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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.
excellent, under £200 is really good IMO
These drives are all coming really soon. OCZ were out first, have they a special deal with Sandforce or something?
Sandforce are brilliant. One of these will be my next purchase, but i might go for vertex 3. undecided……. wont be going for 240gb however, thats too much cash. my wife would kill me.
Very impressive. I love their PSU;s too
Been waiting on a review of one of these for a while now. lives up to what I expected. count me in. (heads to scan).
I love corsair products, quality company.
In this case id just go with whatever one gives the best deal, whether its OCZ or ADATA or whoeever. all the same controller at the end of the day
Got mine disk in my mail soon.
Ill be ordering two when they are available for my new system.
preordered one too
There seems to be a good bit of room for tuning with the sandforce controller. all of the drives perform slightly differently.
Makes it more interesting. I still that max IOPS unit is spectacular from OCZ
so which one OCZ Vertex 3 120 gb or Corsair Force 3 Series 120 gb??
Id go for whichever is cheapest. Same controller with slightly different tweaks.
Totally bogus review. The drives in question have been verified as fully defective and cannot operate inside the specs. All drives fail soonb after install – Corsair has acknowledged this. They came out with a fix that is also bogus. Stay clear of these drives. They are crap.
The review is not bogus – the results came from the drive we have – the drive I still have here – there are many screenshots in the review after all. After I reviewed the product, we noticed it started developing an intermittent fault and I helped Corsair by reporting the issues. The statement regarding the fault we posted front page. One of the first sites on the net to post it actually.
It is actually a problem with the Sandforce controller on specific drives as I have another drive from another OEM with the same issue. If they can fix the problem, the results in this review are valid. The conclusion of the review was appended to reflect the documented issues.
Hint to the people who conducted these tests:
User Alt+Print Screen instead of just Print Screen
what about power consumption?