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Corsair expands line of Force Series solid-state drives

by Parm Mann on 20 May 2010, 13:16

Tags: Corsair

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Corsair's Force Series SSDs have already proven to be quick performers, but if the existing 100GB and 200GB models haven't quite lined up with your budget, you might be in luck.

Corsair is today announcing that its range will be expanded to include the F60, F120, and F240 Force Series SSDs, sporting 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB capacities respectively.

In keeping with existing F100 and F200 drives, Corsair's new additions will continue to make use of a SandForce SF-1200 controller, providing read and write speeds of up to 285MB/s and 275MB/s, respectively.

All five Force Series drives offer support for Windows 7's TRIM command, and Corsair reckons its close relationship with SandForce has resulted in firmware capable of guaranteeing 4K random write performance of 180MB/s.

They're no doubt quick, and if the price of the 60GB Force Series F60 is right, said model could become a popular choice among users in need of a performance-orientated boot drive.

There's sadly no indication of pricing just yet, but we do know that the Force Series F60, F120 and F240 drives will all be available next month.

HEXUS Forums :: 3 Comments

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Posted by citrorm - Fri 21 May 2010 08:19
120g ?
Posted by Sumanji - Fri 21 May 2010 09:48
Cool - I'd love an OCZ Vertex 2 60GB, but the price is just insane. With some competition from Corsair, they may both get a bit cheaper :)

Sandforce rocks btw!
Posted by drunkenmaster - Fri 21 May 2010 11:00
You didn't once mention that basically these will REPLACE the 50GB drive, and OCZ have a Agility 2E on the way.

Its identical, in every single way to the 50GB varient with the same amount of nand flash, the same controller, the same actual type of nand, the same everything.

THe 50GB/100/200gb models use 27% overprovisioning, IE it keeps 27% spare for write level wearing and doing things like garbarge collection, while idle slowly moving any non fully writen blocks and putting them all together on a new block then erasing the original blocks, which means the next write doesn't have to do it at the same time as a new write, as thats much slower. The new models are simply new firmware that uses only 7% overprovisioning, which is fairly standard of every previous drive.

Sure the 27% overprovisioning helps keep writes to a minimum and extends the life marginally, but its complete overkill, even for enterprise models that want to last for a decade its too much, for home use where the drives will be obsolete in 3 years its massive overkill. basically they are just freeing up 20% spare capacity, which unsurprisingly 50GB =1.2 = 60GB. 7% is what Indilinx, samsung, the quietly very fast Toshiba, the Marvell and Jmicron drives have used for 3-4 years.

Agility 2E is quickly replacing the Agilty 2 and offers the higher capacity, the talk on OCZ forums is the flash to update firmware that also chances reprovisioning is much harder, but in the works and do-able by the end user, however it could take UP TO TWO MONTHS, to get done. So in reality we'll probably see a Vertex 2E version thats 60GB as standard and out much sooner.


really the recommendation is wait a few weeks before buying a Vertex 2 as you'll get really the full capacity you should and possibly more aggressive garbage collection which is like automatic Trim done by the drive itself, which right now is very unaggressive and Sandforce drives have degraded performance and really not close to what you see in reviews on a fresh drive.

Seeing as all these 60/120/240gb models are really just fixing an ill advised earlier overprovisioning error, and seeing as eventually the 50GB models should be user flashable to 60GB models(same for larger models aswell) these should not cost ANY more at all.

As for performance, I've yet to see a situation where the Crucial is slower than the Sandforce, admittedly the 128GB version has slower writes, yet in reality it doesn't make a huge amount of difference, especially as performance after a couple weeks and some use drops far more on a Sandforce than a Crucial and much of what home users do is based on reads rather than writes, where the Crucial C300 spanks it in sequential, random, 4kb random and 4kb randrom with a deep queue. Thats why the Crucial wins almost all real world benchmarks(vantage and the like) and tends to be faster loading just about anything, thankfully the 128gb model offers just about the same reads as the 256GB model.

If Crucial had a 64GB model, that didn't have lower performance than the 128gb it would have the best drive out there bar none, if it had a 64gb that had the same speed as the 256gb, buying anything else would be madness. The one area Sandforce excels in, is the low end drive performance is incredibly good vs the biggest drive.