Manufacturer: Corsair Price: $ 120/$125 US Author: Steve Date: 11/23/2010

[ Introduction ]

Today we are looking at two affordable Solid-State Drives from memory maker Corsair, which are built using the infamous SandForce SF-1200 and Indilinx Barefoot controllers. Known as the Force 60GB and Nova 64GB, these drives are priced well under $150 US and provide a reasonable amount of storage given their price tags... High prices are always a stumbling block to new tech adoption and with SSDs it hasn't been any different. We've come a long way from first generation drives that suffered from severe slowdowns, but solid state drives are still far from replacing traditional storage and this is easily explained by comparing cost per gigabyte. Recently there has been a surging demand for drives that sacrifice space for speed and more affordable price tags, and manufacturers have been racing to deliver just that. The first of such drives was the OCZ Agility, which used cheaper NAND flash memory to deliver performance that was not a great deal slower than other Indilinx Barefoot based SSD’s using more expensive memory. Other manufacturers quickly followed, such as Kingston who originally released the "V Series 40GB Boot Drive" based on Intel's X25-M G2 technology. However, Intel never allowed Kingston to implement the TRIM function once it became available and in the end they simply dumped the drive. With that outcome Intel released their own affordable 40GB SSD, which we now know as the X25-V 40GB However Kingston quickly fired back with the "SSDnow V Series" featuring 30GB, 64GB and 128GB capacities. Since then we have seen a large number of low capacity SSDs released that carry sub $150 US price tags, and today we have another two examples on the test bed. The Corsair Force 60GB and Nova 64GB both offer a reasonable amount of storage, considerably more than some of the cheaper 32GB and 40GB models out there. That said, as limiting as a 32GB drive might appear, they can still be extremely useful in enhancing a PC's performance when set to run as the boot drive. These smaller drives can also accommodate for select programs, where they can greatly speed up the use of the application, for example, Adobe Photoshop. The Corsair Force 60GB and Nova 64GB are likely going to appeal to gamers much more than the smaller 32GB and 40GB drives, as they are going to want at least a 60GB drive considering many titles weigh in at more than 8GB these days. We'll be putting each drive through a set of tests, including four synthetic benchmark programs plus our own file copying and load time tests. But before we jump into those results, let's check out each one of the drives in closer detail.

Table of Contents >>> Introduction <<< Corsair Force 60GB in Detail Corsair Nova 64GB in Detail How We Test, System Specs Benchmarks: File Copy Test Benchmarks: Real-World Applications Benchmarks: CrystalDiskMark 3.0 Benchmarks: AS SSD Benchmark Benchmarks: Atto Disk Benchmark Benchmarks: HD Tune Pro Conclusion Next Page ->

poldo

Posted on: 11/24/2010 11:11 AM Nice very nice. These things are slowly becoming more affordable. The Force 60GB would make for a wicked boot drive. Thanks for the review.

ProX	Posted on: 11/24/2010 08:31 PM The Nova 64GB performed nicely but I would be interested to see how it compares to the new Kingston SSDs. Will you review them for us?

Neo1	Posted on: 11/27/2010 01:46 AM Can you guys also test the 64GB Crucial C300 to see how that compares? Otherwise great review as always.

cisco

Posted on: 11/28/2010 12:02 PM Corsair make great products. I just ordered two of the 120GB Force drives from newegg. Great info and excellent testing thank you.