CORSAIR HAS ANNOUNCED a couple of additions to its Force series of solid state drives which, at least in terms of capacity, are competing directly with Intel’s offerings. The new drives are the F40, F80 and F160, all of which offer impressive performance figures, although the pricing is quite competitive considering all things.
The 40GB model has an SRP of $129.99 which is only about $15 more than Intel’s X25-V, but Corsair seems to offer vastly better performance with sequential read speeds of up to 280MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 270MB/s according to the company. The Intel X25-V on the other hand is stuck at 170MB/s for sequential read speed and a paltry 35MB/s for sequential write.
The 80GB model improves on the performance by a whisker with sequential read speeds of up to 285MB/s and sequential write speeds of 275MB/s. With an SRP of $229.99 this is again a direct competitor to Intel’s 80GB X25-M which is retailing for about $10 less. The X25-M is again not as fast with sequential read speeds of 250MB/s and sequential write speeds of 70MB/s.
The 160GB model is anything but cheap with an SRP of $449.99, but again, it’s only about $20 more than Intel’s 160GB X25-M. The performance is on par with the F80, although Intel’s 160GB X25-M does boost the sequential write speed to 100MB/s which is still quite far behind the Corsair drives. All three drives are based on the SandForce SF-1200 controller which offers TRIM support.
The F40 has an unformatted capacity of 40GB while the F80 has an unformatted capacity of 90GB and the F160 has as much as 180GB of unformatted space. This seems very generous of Corsair, as normally you get very exact capacities on SSDs. The F80 and F160 also comes with a 2.5-inch to 3.5-inch bracket which makes it easy to install either in a desktop system. All three drives come with a three year warranty and should hit retail sometime in August.S|A
Lars-Göran Nilsson
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