Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. HD Tach 3.0.4.06. ATTO Disk Benchmark7. AS SSD8. IOMeter9. SiSoft Sandra10. Real World Testing11. Closing Thoughts12. View All Pages

This month Kitguru has been at the forefront of many Solid State Drive reviews including the new models from ADATA and OCZ. Today we are looking at the new model from Corsair, the Force 3 120GB which is set to target a wide audience, offering high levels of SATA III performance for under £200.

Corsair have a well earned reputation within the industry, their product portfolio ranges from high performance liquid based ‘all in one' CPU coolers to class leading 80 Plus Gold Certified power supplies. We have recently tested many 240GB solid state drives however our readers wanted us to look at something slightly more affordable today.

The Force 3 drives use the same Sandforce 2281 controller that is inside the ADATA S511, OCZ Agility 3 and Vertex 3 drives.

All of the SandForce SF-2000 series controllers still utilise the patented DuraWrite technology, on the fly compression which reduces the size of the data written to the drive. When this is paired up with wear leveling and intelligent block management the drive will require fewer write cycles during regular use.

The Corsair Force 3 arrives in a stylishly designed black and blue accented box with the name and size of the product listed on the front.

Corsair supply the drive inside a plastic protective container with a Corsair branded 3.5 inch bay mount inside another container.

The Force 3 120GB is supplied in a plain black chassis with the size listed on the front. A fairly standard chassis design. It is opened by removing four small screws on the rear. Please be aware if you do this, you invalidate the warranty. We don’t really care, but if you buy one, you should.

The 120GB model we are testing today has a NAND flash partition of 16 ICs onto the PCB. The Sandforce Controller is marked SF-2281VB1-SDC, and is made in Taiwan.

Technically, new 25nm NAND FLASH memory has a reduced overall lifespan from 10,000 upwards to around 5,000 program/erase cycles. Industry insiders have hinted that consumer grade 25nm NAND flash memory will have a slightly lower lifespan, between 3,000 and 4,000 program/erase cycles.

While this sounds concerning, if you work out that under normal conditions only between 20-35 full SSD write cycles will be used each year, there is plenty of life in the product. Drive wearing protection also helps to ensure longer lasting flash memory. Thankfully, there is also full TRIM support.

As many already know Sandforce controllers use real time compression. The controllers store a ‘representation’ of your data, not the actual data itself which is achieved by creating a partition of the available NAND flash memory. It can handle around 63 MB/s from one of the eight available channels.

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

CPU: Intel Core i7 2600k
Cooler: Thermaltake Frio OCK
Motherboard: Asus P8P67 Deluxe
Memory: ADATA DDR3 2000mhz 9-11-9-24
PSU: ADATA 1200W
Graphics: Sapphire HD6950 Flex Edition
Chassis: Thermaltake Level 10 GT
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: Dell U2410

Other Drives for comparisons:
OCZ Agility 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 MAX IOPS 240GB
ADATA S511 240GB
Intel 510 120GB
Corsair F100 100GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Crucial Real SSD C300 64GB
Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB

Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark
HD Tach
CrystalMark
AS-SSD Benchmark
IOMeter
SiSoft Sandra
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call Of Pripyat

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0 x64.

With incompressible data, performance suffers a little, but CrystalDiskMark offers an alternative ‘compressible’ setting called 0×00 fill.

Withe the 0x00 0Fill setting enabled, the test results increase significantly. The 120GB Corsair Force 3 scores in a similar ballpark compared against the Agility 3 240GB, solid results in regards to sequential and 4k performance.

I have been using HDTach for many years now and always find it is an invaluable benchmark to ascertain potential levels of performance. HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

Very closely matched with this particular test, all drives are within 15MB/s of each other.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

A strong set of results for the smaller Corsair Force 3 drive, maintaining performance levels close to the Agility 3 and Vertex 3.

AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.

AS SSD uses incompressible data so the sequential speeds are lower than they would be in the real world. A good all round set of results for the Corsair Force 3 120GB drive, although this test is firmly in the hands of the 240GB Vertex 3 MAX IOPS thanks to the staggering performance in the 4k-64Trd read test, scoring over 250MB/s.

IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.

Corsair claim to be able to achieve almost 87,000 IOPS from this drive, but they use very different settings from us, and they wouldn't be directly comparable with tests we have ran in the past on other drives. However, if you want to read more about their settings, head over here.

SiSoft Sandra is a benchmark tool that we use fairly regularly, it is a good all round synthetic software suite. Today we are obviously concentrating on the drive sections to ascertain the S511 and Vertex 3 performance levels.

Close results in the physical disks test which allows for compression.

It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.

Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives and performed a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. We then install a basic suite of software, such as Office, Firefox and Adobe Design, then we install AVG free antivirus. We used a digital watch for this startup and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure.

We recorded the same result as the Agility 3 240gb – 23 seconds in total.

The same performance as the Agility 3 240gb, scoring 18 seconds in total, half the time taken compared to our mechanical reference drive.

Corsair's new Force 3 120GB SSD delivers what we would expect from the new Sandforce powered range of drives – class leading performance. We have reviewed many 240GB drives in recent weeks and this is the first 120GB unit we have analysed in our labs. The 120GB size will probably be one of the most popular, thanks to a very competitive retail price.

The latest Sandforce drives are easily the fastest on the market and have no real weaknesses. Sequential performance from the controller is great and the 4k results highlight the difference between this generation and the last.

The main talking point apart from performance, will be the price point, and we think this will sell very well for Corsair. Scan are already taking preorders at £180 inc vat which is going to suit a wider field of enthusiast user. For those with deeper pockets, they are also releasing a 240GB Force 3, but be prepared for a more substantial outlay.

Corsair will also be releasing a new series of drives called the Force GT which will use ONFI synchronous NAND (not async NAND) delivering even greater levels of performance, but with a higher cost overhead.

Pros:

• strong all round performance
• excellent pricing
• ideal for raid 0 – maintaining a sub £400 cost

Cons:

• none we can think of

Kitguru says: One of the best 120GB SSD's on the market.

Edit June 2011: KitGuru were one of the first publications to get access to these drives. Since the review went live our unit developed an intermittent fault and we reported it to Corsair. The problems were not isolated and Corsair issued this statement. We are confident if they fix the stability issues that the results we achieved in this review will be accurate.

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