Corsair's Force SSD Reviewed: SF-1200 is Very Good
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 14, 2010 2:27 AM ESTOverall System Performance using PCMark Vantage
Next up is PCMark Vantage, another system-wide performance suite. For those of you who aren’t familiar with PCMark Vantage, it ends up being the most real-world-like hard drive test I can come up with. It runs things like application launches, file searches, web browsing, contacts searching, video playback, photo editing and other completely mundane but real-world tasks. I’ve described the benchmark in great detail before but if you’d like to read up on what it does in particular, take a look at Futuremark’s whitepaper on the benchmark; it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to be a member of a comprehensive storage benchmark suite. Any performance impacts here would most likely be reflected in the real world.
Real world performance is very competitive. Corsair's Force is easily in the top 3 for best performing SSDs on the market today.
The memories suite includes a test involving importing pictures into Windows Photo Gallery and editing them, a fairly benign task that easily falls into the category of being very influenced by disk performance.
The TV and Movies tests focus on on video transcoding which is mostly CPU bound, but one of the tests involves Windows Media Center which tends to be disk bound.
The gaming tests are very well suited to SSDs since they spend a good portion of their time focusing on reading textures and loading level data. All of the SSDs dominate here, but as you'll see later on in my gaming tests the benefits of an SSD really vary depending on the game. Take these results as a best case scenario of what can happen, not the norm.
In the Music suite the main test is a multitasking scenario: the test simulates surfing the web in IE7, transcoding an audio file and adding music to Windows Media Player (the most disk intensive portion of the test).
The Communications suite is made up of two tests, both involving light multitasking. The first test simulates data encryption/decryption while running message rules in Windows Mail. The second test simulates web surfing (including opening/closing tabs) in IE7, data decryption and running Windows Defender.
I love PCMark's Productivity test; in this test there are four tasks going on at once, searching through Windows contacts, searching through Windows Mail, browsing multiple webpages in IE7 and loading applications. This is as real world of a scenario as you get and it happens to be representative of one of the most frustrating HDD usage models - trying to do multiple things at once. There's nothing more annoying than trying to launch a simple application while you're doing other things in the background and have the load take forever.
The final PCMark Vantage suite is HDD specific and this is where you'll see the biggest differences between the drives:
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hybrid2d4x4 - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link
Thanks for the power consumption charts, Anand! Any chance you can throw in a typical 2.5" 5400RPM HDD that usually comes stock in most laptops as a reference point for those of us who are thinking of upgrading? Also, could keeping Device Initiated Power Management disabled account for the significant discrepancies between your numbers and the recent article on Tom's HW? (ie: Tom's got an idle of 0.1W for the intel drive- a lot better than the competition)http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/6gb-s-ssd-hdd,...
Impulses - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link
The Nova seems to do surprisingly well under Anand's heavy workload test, compared to other Indillix-based drives... Altho it's performance is just average (and similar to other Indillix drives) in most other tests. Isn't the Nova essentially the same thing as the OCZ Solid 2? (and the G.Skill Falcon II) That drive has been priced VERY competitively from what I've seen, I'm surprised there isn't more buzz around it. Looking forward to Anand's review of the Nova.I might be buying soon as a gift for my sister, she really needs more than 80GB for her laptop (80GB X25-M is still the best bang for the buck out there imo), so a $300 120GB is right up her alley.
_Q_ - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link
Sorry for being a little off-topic (still SSD though)...Are there any news on when is the Indilinx JetStream going to be released in some drive from any vendor?
Cause as far as I know, this was initially going to be out in end of 2009, then there was a delay... but no further info that I could find more recently.
Thanks for any help.
Hauraki - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link
I'm thinking to buy a SSD for system drive and the v+ 2nd gen appeared to be a decent choice for home use. Only got review on X-bit and Hexus so far, would like to see an Anand review.Thanks.
IvanChess - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 - link
"The Mean Time To Failure numbers are absurd. We’re talking about the difference between 228 years and over 1100 years. I’d say any number that outlasts the potential mean time to failure of our current society is pretty worthless."Well said!
Rindis - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
But think of the future!In a couple thousand years, when very little is remembered of this time, entire dissertation papers on early 21st century culture will be written based on the contents of your hard drive!
(And if that isn't a scary thought, I don't know what is....)
stalker27 - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
Was wondering if the charts could be fixed to correctly display the HDD values for random ops?Something like if the value doesn't fit in the bar it should be displayed after the bar, to its right... and not to its left as it does now colliding with the name of the HDD.
BTW, that was actually a factor I'm looking into seeing in SSD reviews... how good are they at the really useful operations, not that sequential doesn't matter, that much.
zzing123 - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
Given the SandForce controllers effectively compress data on the drive, I'm just curious about precisely how much data you can write to the drive...For example, if data is say text, and you create a 1MB text file, how many of those 1MB text files can you physically store on the drive versus another non-SandForce drive? Just a curiosity.
xilb - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
the OCZ LE isnt using the SF-1500only the vertex 2 pro is using the SF-1500 and the vertex 2 is using SF-1200
the LE has a chip that sort of in the middle of the 2 .........look it up on the OCZ forms you will see
paulpod - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
Needless to say the author is completely wrong about what a MTBF number means. That number has nothing to do with infant mortality rate nor with life expectancy. It is the statistical failure rate over a large number of units operating in their prime life period.