Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

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Apoptosis
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Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by Apoptosis »

We've seen several different capacities of Corsair's Force SSD drives on our test benches this year and we've been impressed with their performance. Corsair is now offering a 40GB version which will primarily fit the demographic for users who want a boot drive with the speed of an enthusiast level SSD but without the price tag of the higher capacity drives. Will it knock the popular Intel 40GB off of boot drive hill?

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The Corsair Force 40GB SSD may be the baby in the Force Series family but that doesn't stop it from putting up numbers to rival that of its older siblings in most of our tests. If you are considering entering the world of SSDs but don't want to drop serious coin, this may be one of the best places to start. As far as other options go, the closest competitor is probably the Intel X25-V 40GB drive which can be found for roughly the same price but frankly, that drive is aging fast and overall does not offer the same performance as you will get from the Force 40GB drive. The 40GB Force drive performs superbly, albeit slightly behind its larger siblings. This can mostly be attributed to the lower density NAND but it still offers the fabulous SF-1200 controller with its support of TRIM and its proprietary DuraClass technology...
Article Title: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1454/1/
Pricing At Time Of Print: $112 shipped
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Major_A
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Re: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by Major_A »

Let me first clarify my post with this. Sorry it seems I have a comment or unrelated question about every review. With that said...
1) Thanks again for actually testing the drives in a real world environment. I get tired of looking at IOMeter stats, since they don't mean much to me. The worst is when sites test portable storage and never include a real world test. Why do I care what a thumb drive scores in CrystalDiskMark's 4K test; the real question should be how does it work as intended.[/ENDRANT]
2) For the boot tests have you looked at Soluto or Bootracer?
3) I want Santa (aka someone who loves me) to bring me an SSD for Christmas. At this point in time there are so many options out there that it's a daunting task trying to find one. I want more than 100GB with good read/write speeds, supports TRIM and that doesn't cost more than $200. Any suggestions?

Keep up the good work on the drive reviews. You are the only site I know that doesn't just throw the SOP benchmarks at it and call it a day.
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Re: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by FZ1 »

Thanks! I did briefly look at some boot timing programs but not the two you mentioned. I'll check them out. Right now, I would recommend any SandForce based SSD. They all support TRIM (as long as your OS supports it and you aren't running a RAID array) and the DuraClass technology really does help these drives stand out. Not that the other controllers are bad, I just think SandForce has everyone trying to catch up with them right now. Things may change come January when we see a lot of the new drives announced at CES and expect to see the NAND to get faster too with <34nm manufacturing.

As for which drive/manufacturer, I would choose based on the best mix of level of support (firmware updates, tech & RMA support), price and warranty. There are a lot of one off SSD makers that probably won't be able to provide the level of support that you see from the more mainstream companies like OCZ, Corsair, Kingston, G.Skill, etc
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Re: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by Major_A »

Out of support (aka Firmware, etc...) who provides a better experience OCZ or Corsair?
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Re: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by FZ1 »

They are both great in my experience. OCZ has a history of spewing out new firmware quickly which hasn't always ended up good for them but they seem to have throttled back a bit lately. OCZ's forum gets a lot of traffic though. I've never had to contact either for support so I have not personal experience to share.
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Re: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by Major_A »

I've had to RMA an item to both companies before, RAM (Corsair) and a power supply (OCZ). They both treated me right so I know their RMA services are both superb. I'll take a look around and see what I come up with. Chances are I really can't go wrong either way.
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Re: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by trucz »

I'm concerned about the motherboard you used. It does not support SATA III. The RealSSD C300 is being misrepresented in the latest solid state drive reviews. I use to think the RealSSD was one of the top performing SSD but in the latest reviews, it seems the performance is all over the place.
MSI K9A2 CF
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Re: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by FZ1 »

Nate did a SATA III review of the C300 we didn't put those #'s in the comparisons because it wouldn't be a direct comparison so I ran the same drive on my bench under the same conditions as the other drives in the grid.

On SATA II, the C300 performance would just be capped at the bandwidth saturation point which is really only going to impact the reads. On SATA III, the writes for that drive never exceeded the capabilities of SATA II so they should be an accurate representation of the drive performance in that respect.
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Re: Corsair Force 40GB Boot Drive SSD Review

Post by pwcmed »

Man thanks for this review. Loving those real world benchmarks!!!
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