14 DAY TRIAL // Corsair seems to have taken a special liking to the ever so popular SandForce controller, because it just decided to expand one of its more prominent SSD series based on it. The line in question goes by the name of Force, no doubt an allusion to the SandForce itself. To be more specific, the company added three new members to its ranks, each with a different storage capacity but mostly identical overall specifications.
Like all of their siblings, the three employ the 2.5-inch form factor, which allows them to become part of both laptops and desktop PCs, though 3.5-inch mounting Brackets may be required for the latter case. Also, they all communicate via the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface, whose bandwidth combined with the performance of the SF-1200 controller enables very high read and write speeds on par with those foR higher-capacity drives.
The capacities of the new Force SSDs don't seem to impact on speeds. All of then read at up to 285 MB/s and write at a noteworthy 275 MB/s. Other specifications include support for the Windows 7 TRIM command, which keeps these data rates high over time, and a 4K random write performance of over 50,000 IOPS. Furthermore, the solid state drives are built out of MLC (multi-level cell NAND Flash chips) and will become available worldwide in August, at prices of $129.99 (40GB), $229.99 (80GB) and $449.99 (160GB).
"In our testing in the Corsair Lab, we found that the new Force Series 40GB SSD outperform competitive SSDs from Intel and Kingston by a wide margin," said John Beekley, Vice President of Technical Marketing at Corsair. "With SandForce's unique DuraWrite architecture, there is almost no performance penalty when reducing the capacity of the drive."
"With competitive pricing and amazing performance, these new drives are a force to be reckoned with," said Jim Carlton, Vice President of Marketing at Corsair. "All of the new models deliver an excellent price/performance ratio, but the aggressively priced 40GB F40 is incredibly attractive and, quite simply, the ideal boot drive for any Windows 7 desktop PC."