Z68 SSD Caching with Corsair's F40 SandForce SSD

Final Words

Despite what it may look like, Intel appears to have picked the best balance of capacity and performance with its 20GB SLC SSD 311. While I agree that $110 is a bit steep, the SSD 311 does offer surprisingly well rounded performance as a cache. Intel mentioned to me that it did some tweaks to the 311's firmware to improve its performance as a cache, which could help explain just how well it does in our tests. Where the 311 does fall short however is in its capacity and pricing. I'd like to see a 40GB drive priced below $80, however even with a move to 25nm NAND I'm not sure we'd see that from Intel.

Corsair's F40 does pretty well as a cache and if you've got one around the house by all means go for it. Unless you've got a huge collection of applications and games that you'd like to cache however, I'd stick with the 311 at the same price point. If you can snag a F40 for a reduced price however, that does make it a lot more attractive. Here's to hoping that Corsair can push prices down below $85 on that drive for the Z68 users out there that want to experiment with SSD caching.