Corsair's Force SSD Reviewed: SF-1200 is Very Good
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 14, 2010 2:27 AM ESTFinal Words
Update: Random write performance of the drive we reviewed may change with future firmware updates. Click here to find out more.
Well, so much for the SF-1200 being a slouch. From the looks of it, I'd say that what you're looking at is a binned SF-1500 that performs well enough for most client use. Corsair's Force delivers the exact same performance as OCZ's Vertex LE, which also makes it your best bet if you're looking for a single drive that offers better-than-Intel performance. Unfortunately you do pay for it. If you look at how much you're paying per usable GB of space, these SandForce drives carry a ~33% price premium over Intel's X25-M G2.
The Corsair Force drive should be resilient enough to maintain good performance regardless of desktop workload. SandForce's unique architecture means that read performance actually suffers more than write performance over time, thankfully you'll never be in a situation where you'll need to read back LBAs that have garbage data in them so this shouldn't be a problem.
I really have no performance complaints about the SF-1200 or Corsair's Force drive. Both did very well in our tests. My concerns continue to be about long term reliability since we've only really seen these drives shipping in earnest for a couple of months now. If you're fine taking the risk, the performance is very nice. Otherwise I'd wait to see how these drives hold up over time before committing.
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marc_soad - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
If I'm not wrong, what the author means is 2 000 000 hours = 83 333 days = 228 years.So the drive is meant to fail after 228 years if it's powered on all the time, or more if the computer is powered on only for a portion of the day.
Thanks for the review by the way! :)
p05esto - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
Hey, I COMPLETELY agree with the printing thing....I hate articles that have "pages", I'd rather view a 10 page long single document....yes, I'm that frickin lazy. You shouldn't remove the pages, but offer a FULL view option? I use the print option sometimes as well just to read an article all at once.poee - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
"Performance is down, as you'd expect, but not to unbearable levels and it's also pretty consistent."Why is performance down? Why should we "expect" this? Do I have to read every SSD article you've written previously to understand new articles? Or is there one big article that has all the info that you obliquely allude to in subsequent articles?
Where can I find the current recommendations for SSDs (SandForce vs Indilinx vs Intel vs Micron vs Samsung, latest firmware updates, etc.)? Is there a central repository of SSD information that is assimilated and arranged categorically (for easy research), or must all this info be followed like a blog?