SSD Buyer's Guide

JMicron 612 and Toshiba 618

Used in: Adata S592, Corsair Reactor Series, Kingson V Series (128GB, 64GB - SNV425 parts), Patriot Zephyr

The follow up to the ill-fated JMF 602 drive controller, the JMF612 controller is much more robust, as well as offering full support for TRIM in Windows 7. The full-speed JMF612 controller is used in both the Adata and Corsair Reactor series, and as we found, it’s not a bad controller at all.

Sequential speeds for a 128GB drive are around 230MB/sec read and 150MB/sec write, and random read performance is good too. Random performance has improved since we first looked at the controller, following firmware updates, although the random read speed isn’t as fast as that of the Indilinx or Intel controllers.

The Kingston V series drives use a version of the JMF612 designed in cooperation with Toshiba and rebadged as JMF618. This performs a little differently (Kingston rates the 128GB drive at 200MB/sec read and 160GB/s write) but the key is that the JMF618 controller delivers much lower random performance.

Verdict: The JMF612 drives are worth considering, as they typically sell for a lower price than the competition, but more performance can be found elsewhere. Toshiba JMF618 drives might be cheap, but they lack even more of the sequential and random performance of other drives.

Toshiba

Used in: Kingston V series (30GB only - SNV125 parts) and Kingston V+ Series (64GB-512GB - SNVP325 parts)

The Toshiba T6UG1XBG drive controller is, as far as we’ve seen, exclusively used in Kingston SSDs, with the most recent V+ series of drives moving from the Samsung controller to the Toshiba earlier this year. The controller is also used in the 30GB V series drive as well, with performance scaling down with lower capacities. The 30GB drive will only manage a sequential read speed of 180MB/sec and a sequential write speed of 50MB/sec, compared to the 128GB V+ Series’ 220MB/sec and 180MB/sec comparatively.

While the controller delivers solid sequential performance, random read speeds of 19MB/sec are a little low, with random writes similarly low at sub-7MB/sec. Additionally, the controller has received no user-deployable firmware updates since its release in February; a concern for any buyer.

Verdict: Delivers on sequential performance and typically much cheaper than competing drives, but the poor random performance and lack of user-deployable updates taints what would otherwise be a capable controller.

Samsung

Used in: Corsair P-series, Kingston V+ Series (SNV225 parts numbers only), OCZ Summit Series, Samsung own brand SSDs, Numerous unbranded OEM drives.

Samsung’s S3C29RBB01 (aka PB22-J) drive controller had rough start in life, shipping with a bug that hindered performance if you performed a full format of the drive. Frustratingly, this was then followed by months of silence from Samsung - it took over six months to deploy a firmware update fixing bugs and adding TRIM support.

Nowadays, the Samsung drive controller is much more up to standard, with sequential read speeds of around 230MB/sec and write speeds of 180MB/sec on a 128GB drive. Random read performance isn’t as good as that of the Indilinx though, let alone of the Intel controller and random write speeds are poor - only a few times faster than those of hard disks at between 2-4MB/sec. The Samsung drive controller also tends to suffer from high write latencies once in a used state, even with TRIM.

Verdict: With better controllers out there, the Samsung option isn’t very appealing, despite the excellent write speeds.