14 DAY TRIAL // Corsair has recently announced that the company has managed to solve all the problems that affected the 120GB version of the Force 3 SandForce-based solid state drives and that these will start making their appearance on retailer shelves starting next week.
Corsair's Force 3 SSDs target high-performance systems and are built using the SandForce SF-2281 controller paired together with 25nm NAND Flash cells manufactured by IMFT.
Despite the impressive performance demonstrated by these drives, they were affected by a series of problems, which forced Corsair to announce last week that they have recalled all the 120GB Force 3 units released until then.
The issues that affected the drives ranged from BSODs and BIOS detection errors to random freezes and RAID failures.
According to Corsair's findings, the problems were caused by a bad firmware in conjunction with a faulty printed circuit board (PCB) design, so fixing these issues required that the SSDs would be sent back to the manufacturer.
“We’ve worked closely with our partners to determine a root cause but there is no single issue at fault.
“I’m sure you’ll have questions about how this could happen but we can only say that our production test did not catch this combination of issues and we have implemented multiple corrective actions, involving both firmware and hardware, and are confident we have resolved all currently known issues,” read an e-mail sent by Corsair last week.
Users who have bought a faulty Force 3 SSD can choose between getting a replacement drive or being fully reimbursed.
Detailed instructions regarding the replacement process are available on Corsair's forums (over here).
New drives that have the fix implemented can be distinguished from their older counterparts by the first four numbers above the product part number on the UPC sticker. Anything with 1122 or lower needs to be returned. Anything with 1123 or above is a new product. (via NordicHardware)