This is a very fast storage upgrade for your very fast laptop

May 25, 2012 07:00 GMT  ·  By

Well-known memory and SSD manufacturer Corsair is announcing the new “Force Series 3 SSD Notebook Upgrade Kit” on its official website. The upgrade kits come with two SSD sizes: 120 GB and 240 GB.

SSDs are an obvious advantage over normal HDDs. When compared with 2.5” laptop drives that are usually twice slower than a desktop HDD, an SSD is like a “Warp Drive.”

Not only do the sequential transfer rates go up from the average 50 MB/s to a respectable 350 ~ 400 MB/s, but the access times are a hundred times faster, and the multi-threading will actually work respectably.

Of course, these results are only possible with SATA III laptops.

Notebooks with SATA I or SATA II will still benefit, but users should mind their budget and go for a more affordable solution, such as TeamGroup's A1 and SiliconPower's T10.

Corsair's new upgrade drives are just 7 millimeters thin and use the well-known SandForce 2281 controller.

When it comes to hard disk drives, multi-threading was, for the past two decades, something like a “black hole.” Sure, you can copy some info from directory x to directory y, but if you start another copy task, you’ll see the performance go down by up to 90%.

Sequential transfers, like copying an “.avi” file from one folder to another, usually yield decent performance out of the hard drive and you’ll probably have a copy speed of around 40 MB/s.

Start another copy of another file during the process and you’ll probably expect to see the transfer rate being equally shared between the two tasks, right? Wrong!

The HDD’s total throughput will go down to around 4 MB/s or 5 MB/s and you’ll see each task being worked at around 2 MB/s or 3 MB/s.

Some desktop HDDs launched in the past 5 or 6 years had better firmware that was able to decently handle multi-threading, yielding performance of around 10 MB/s to 20 MB/s, but that’s still half of the normal sequential speed of a HDD.

Due to the fact that the access time of an SSD is a lot shorter than the one of a regular hard disk drive, a multi-threading scenario will usually show the same – or close to the same – throughput as a sequential copy.

Boot speeds will be halved, and starting two or more programs at the same time will be much faster.

Corsair also offers a SATA-to-USB data transfer kit and some migration software that will help users move their files on the new SSD, and it will also allow them to use the internal HDD as a mobile USB disk.

There will also be a power consumption reduction, but while it is significant in itself (an SSD usually consumes half or even less than a HDD) it won’t be considerable for the whole laptop, as the HDD is not as power-consuming as the LCD or the CPU/chipset/GPU.

Pricing is slated at 139.99 USD for the 128 GB version and 259.99 USD for the 256 GB model. That’s around 112 EUR and 206 EUR, respectively, when European customers are concerned.

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Corsair's new SSD Upgrade Kit
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