Corsair Nova Series V32 review

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Verdict:

Decent performance for a small-capacity SSD, but a 64GB disk is better value overall.

Review Date: 15 May 2011

Price when reviewed: £59

Supplier: http://www.aria.co.uk

Reviewed By: Tom Morgan

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

If you like the idea of buying an SSD for improved performance, but don’t want to empty your bank account to buy one, a small capacity disk such as Corsair’s 32GB Nova V32 could be a great compromise. It may not be the fastest SSD around, but should still offer significant performance gains over a mechanical hard disk. Despite the budget price, the V32 (as with all Nova SSDs) includes a 3½ mounting bracket that makes installing the disk in your PC much easier.

The Nova V32 doesn’t have the blistering file transfer speeds of Corsair's Force series, but read speeds are still noticeably higher than a mechanical disk. In our benchmarks, it wrote large files at 70.1MB/s and read them at 187.9MB/s, exactly in line with Corsair’s claims. Unsurprisingly, the small files test was significantly lower, as even SSDs struggle with large numbers of very small files. Read speeds of 45.2MB/s write and 71MB/s are still very reasonable however. The disk excelled in our game test, loading the Crysis level in 27 seconds.

A small capacity SSD such as the Nova V32 is ideal for running Windows alongside a larger mechanical hard disk for storing your files, but you’ll have to be frugal with your files to avoid frequently running out of space (Windows 7 alone consumes around 15GB). At £59 the Nova V32 is cheap, but it cost more than other SSDs per GB. If you can afford an extra £20, the Kingston SSDnow V100 64GB has double the capacity and is faster, too.

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