While everyone was scrambling to be the first out the door with SATA 6Gbps drives using SandForce controllers, Corsair cheekily launched a midrange SATA 6Gbps drive that uses a Marvell 9174 controller. The P in the name stands for Performance, and there are certain aspects of this drive where the performance really does stand out.
Sequential results were incredibly impressive, with the P3 delivering 360.5 MB/s reads and 176.94 MB/s writes. While not up to the 515MB/s read and 266.93 MB/s write speed of the SATA 6Gbps Sandforce controller in OCZ's Vertex 3, these scores are much more impressive than the SATA 3Gbps drives in this group test.
Where the choice of controller really comes into play though is in the 4K 64 thread test. Writes were made at 72.65 MB/s, while reads averaged 57.65 MB/s. In contrast the SATA 3Gbps SATA controller on the Silicon Power S20 was capable of higher speeds, with scores of 123.29 MB/s in the write test and 93.87MB/s in the read ones. This really shows off the lead that Sandforce enjoys in the SATA controller market.
So while the P3 is a highly capable SATA 6Gbps SSD it doesn't make it into the ranks of top performer, largely due to its delivering speeds less than the best SATA 3Gbps drives can deliver.
This is somewhat made up by the price per gigabyte being less than the Silicon Power drive, but unfortunately - and more crucially - it is also higher than the OCZ Vertex 3, which makes this a tough drive to recommend at the price.
