Corsair Neutron 240GB Solid State Drive Review

The first thing you will notice about the Neutron is how light it is. When compared to a standard drive, it feels around half the weight and makes you wonder how little there is inside. The drive hosts a grey shell with a sticker on the front with drive information and branding in blue.

On the underside of the drive, the next thing we notice is the lack of screws in wither corner to hold bot parts together. After a few seconds of head scratching, a simple trim pry bar slots down the side of the case and the shell opens up.

As we’ve noted before, the Neutron is a mere 7mm thick and with its ultra slim build allows for better compatibility in systems and more importantly the likes of ultra books, where space is at a premium and we find most drives not fitting.

Opening the case up, the PCB is attached by three screws to the lower half of the shell. On the lower half we can see a small thermal contact pad, which allows the controller to dissipate any heat through to the thin metal case. Moving on to the PCB in a little more detail, the upper side hosts eight of the sixteen NAND ICs, each with a 16GB capacity. Towards the SATA terminals, we also find one of two cache ICs.

The lower side of the PCB like the upper hosts a further eight NAND ICs, produced by Micron. These are the same 25nm circuits as previously found on the Force series of SSDs. Moving in even closer, we can take a look at the new flagship controller from LAMD. The LM87800 controller is set to be a great rival to the popular SandForce counterpart, offering up much improved performance with both compressible and incompressible data, however we do note that in relation to the SF-2281 controller, write speeds are a little lower due to the use of a different compression technology.