Item: Corsair Force F100 SSD - SandForce-powered performance
Author: Tarinder Sandhu

Review: Corsair Force F100 SSD - SandForce-powered performance

Final thoughts and rating

The inherent cost of solid-state drives means that they remain a wish-list product for most people, and we don't see the status quo changing anytime soon. But such can be the performance benefit over spindle-based drives; customers in the enterprise space may well see them as cheap upgrades that provide genuine system-wide performance benefits.

The thin line that exists between the high-end consumer and entry-level enterprise segments is one that Corsair is hoping to exploit with the SandForce-powered Force series of SSDs. Shipping with the SF-1200 controller and either a usable 100GB or 200GB, the Force arrive at etail with price-tags of £320 and £560, respectively, thereby demanding superlative performance across a range of benchmarks.

SandForce's intelligent controller and fast Micron NAND combine for class-leading performance in enterprise-orientated applications, and the Corsair Force F100 bats away competition from Crucial's RealSSD C300 and Intel's X25-M G2. Spicing up matters, Corsair ships the drive with firmware that enables the F100 to replicate the performance - up to 30,000 IOPS for random 4K writes - associated with the higher-specified SandForce SF-1500 controller.

Bottom line: Corsair's Force SSDs represent premium performance for a premium price. Most consumers will be presented with a more favourable £-to-GB metric by opting for, say, the super-speedy Intel X25-M 160GB, but if your need is characterised by massive bombardment of the storage subsystem, few, if any, drives are better than the Force range.

The good

Excellent performance, especially with respect to workstation and database workloads
Solid performance in all tests

The not so good

Premium price puts it out of the reach of most
Generous over-provisioning impedes usable space

HEXUS Rating

Corsair Force F100 SSD

HEXUS Awards

Corsair Force F100 SSD

HEXUS Where2Buy

The Corsair Force F100 (100GB)is available on pre-order for £320.85. The Force F200 (200GB) is also on pre-order for £557.

HEXUS Right2Reply

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As the name suggests, it has a 100GB capacity that formats down to some 93GB in Windows.

Surely:

As the name suggests, it has a 100GB capacity that formats to 93GiB in Windows.

Base 2 vs Base 10? Windows 7 I believe does make the distinction between GB and GiB.

a 100GB capacity that formats down to some 93GB in Windows.

What do you mean by “formats down”? Corsair quotes the capacity of the drive in GB figures (10^9 * 100) whereas Windows in GiB (2^30 * 93) figures. Either way, the drive provides you with about 1 billion bytes of user addressable space. Formatting takes away space in the hundreds if not dozens of MB and nowhere near a gigabyte let alone 7!

Also I have no idea why this drive would be good for the enterprise space. It can't go in a (enterprise) server/SAN because of the lack of a SAS interface. The drive performs poorly in cases where compressed data is worked on because the SF controller relies on on-the-fly deduplication in order to achieve higher IOPS. AFAIK crystal mark's test data are random (non compressible) which would explain the poor performance. I have to assume that the drive performance would suffer with encrypted data which are normally completely random (assume because the incomplete, purely benchmark queen review didn't analyze or test for this). Encryption is becoming more and more prevalent in the enterprise.

So that's 2 scenarios that this drive just can't cut it in an enterprise (one client and one server side). You can't just say enterprise and be done with it, you need to test in an enterprise scenario context, i.e. can you actually tap into this performance, in say a server that a small to medium enterprise is likely to use, with a sata interface. Are there any downsides to using a consumer level half-duplex interface drive in an enterprise? Would this enterprise get support if they use a SATA drive (either from the manufacturer or their subcontractors)? I'm not being funny, these are genuine questions that I don't know the answer of but a review looking at a product's enterprise credentials should at least attempt to answer.

I haven't read the review but this uses the 1200 controller (right ?) and so was never intended for the enterprise class, mainly, because its not as durable for enterprise as the 1500 drives although that still remains to be proven as well I guess.

Other than the fact its been brought down too 93G(i)B it was already brought down too 100GB from 128GB so the SF controller would work properly :(

I agree this looks much more like an enthusiast drive rather then enterprise, although there are more tempting drives around for the enthusiast in this price range. The Crucial drive has more future proofing with sata6 and beats the corsair in many tests.. Not to forget OCZ new helpings on the horizon, looking forward to see some vertex 2 benches vs the competition!

It seems as if Corsair is using an SF-1500-like firmware on the F100.

If the version you are running is 3.01, then by Anand's account, you are running an SF-1500 firmware (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3661/understanding-sandforces-sf1200-sf1500-not-all-drives-are-equal/2).
One thing I find puzzling though, is the difference in the 4K Random write performance of the C300 on Hexus vs Anandtech (http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/6 - BTW, to Sickorz, that's a review of the Vertex 2 if you are interested).