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There has never been a better time to pick up an SSD boot drive with many of the leading manufacturers releasing 30-40GB units at very reasonable prices. KitGuru has already looked at the Intel X25-V 40GB and we were very impressed with the price to performance ratio, especially when set into a Raid 0 configuration.
Today we continue along similar lines and take a look at the newest Corsair 40GB SSD – the F40. These are retailing in the UK now for £95 inc vat, so for under £200 you could end up with a killer Raid 0 boot drive based around the class leading Sandforce SF-1200 controller. A single 120GB SSD makes for a great boot drive, but two 40GB's are faster, and cheaper. It's a dead cert win-win.
Corsair kindly sent us two of the F40's and we decided to recreate our previous test environment and put them head to head against the Intel X25 V's in Raid 0. The difference with the Corsair 40GB drives is that there is no performance hit like other SSD's when they reduce the number of Flash ICs to reduce the cost.
Yep, this is going to get dirty. Just the way we like it.
| Corsair Force 40GB F40 | |
| Capacity | 40GB |
| Controller | Sandforce SF-1200 |
| Maximum Read | 285MB/s |
| Maximum Write | 275 MB/s |
| Sustained Write | 250 MB/s |
| Max I/O Per Second (IOPS) | 50,000 IOPS (4kb file) |
| NAND Flash | Latest generation Sanforce controller Multi Level Cell (MLC) |
| Interface | Sata II |
| Trim Support | Yes – requires Windows 7 |
| Warranty | 2 Years |
over half a gigabyte per second performance rates, hilarious. love it ! I remember when getting 30mb/s was considered awesome and it cost more than these.
Damn Zardon do you ever sleep buddy? Great article and this seems to be a sweet price to performance point, under 200 for this? yes please. Sandforce controller is a very well balanced solution.
Very good too see such amazing performance and at such a modest price considering. I agree with the conclusion ‘delicious’ comment. it really is such a sweet time to buy technology.
These make a nice combination. whats next? four drives ? :p
Dear god man, give me some of that lovely hardware you get daily, its not fair!
OMG, my dreams have been answered I was wanting this EXACT review for a week now. This is my next purchase, but I do need to stop reading this site, I get envy with all the wicked products you get.
OMG, my dreams have been answered I was wanting this EXACT review for a week now. This is my next purchase, but I do need to stop reading this site, I get envy with all the wicked products you get.
Under £200, that is awesome. 40gb is a bit too small I think, so its nice you double the size and performance. will get these from OCUK.
two SSDs reviews in a day? spolit for choice 🙂
Sandforce controller is wicked. now we need a raid 0 review of the 256 GB Crucial REALSSDs 🙂 only 1k of SSD, bargain !
It is refreshing to see that performance isnt butchered due to going for a small size. sandforce rocks.
It is refreshing to see that performance isnt butchered due to going for a small size. sandforce rocks.
I was waiting for the crucial drives to come out at this size, but the marvell controller will not scale well at this size I dont think. 128gb for instance is poor compared to 256 unit.
Well that was rather interesting, over 500mb/s? wtf, speechless. not too shabby for 190 quid.
Corsair make such brilliant products, love their power supplies too. Waiting on a 850W review 🙂
Wow thats killer performance aint it ? Price is great. I dont think I would buy a single drive after reading this. raid 0 seems the way to go.
The intel drives have dropped in price, probably since these came out 🙂
Corsair have a good product here, seems the price point is good also. I wonder how they are selling, I dont know anyone who has bought an ssd.
SSDs are finally becoming affordable. they really DO make a huge difference, I always thought it was nonsense until I bought one for my laptop. it makes it feel like a new machine.
Anyone here got one of these drives, id like another opinion 🙂
Good on Corsair, its forced the price of the intel drives another £10 🙂
Are SSDs really that big a deal? I can generate wait a few seconds.
It depends how much you use your computer and what you are doing on it. for surfing the net, and random things, might be not needed, but if you are seriously using it, its like one of the best upgrades you can give it.
I hear corsair are working on a new controller with indilinx. any truth in this?
what about performance detoriating?
with RAID,trim is not possiblle…
I guess reinstalls would need to be taken into consideration for systems with this. That said, I think for the audience with the knowledge to Raid 0 drives they would reinstall their OS after a few months anyway. I know I do. every 4 months or so.
Actually Intel did release support for TRIM in raid o or raid 1. Not sure about these corsair units.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/03/23/intel-releases-trim-for-raid/1
Tigerdirect has these on sale right now for $99.99 after $30 mail in rebate. I’m picking one up tonight.
Thanks for the review..