SATA III SSD Round-Up: OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, Crucial

Name: SATA III SSD Round-Up: OCZ, Corsair, Patriot, Crucial
Brand: SATA

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, July 12, 2011, 12:00 PM EDT

Next up we have a couple of drives from Corsair, the Force 3 Series and Force GT. Like the OCZ drives on the previous page, these two are both built around the SandForce SF-2281 controller, but Corsair’s drives use different PCB layouts and one of them is outfitted with different Flash memory.

120GB Corsair Force GT - Click To Enlarge

The Force GT drive you see here is a 120GB model outfitted with 128GB of Micron 25nm synchronous NAND flash, model 29F64G08CBAAB. The drive is rated for max reads and writes of 555MB/s and 515MB/s, respectively, making it the highest-performing drive in Corsair’s current line-up. In attempt to make the Force GT stand-out, it sports a bright-red enclosure, which looks pretty awesome if you ask us.

120GB Corsair Force 3 Series - Click To Enlarge

The Force 3 Series drive is very similar to the Force GT. This drive, however, is outfitted with 25nm asynchronous NAND Flash memory, model 29F64G08CBAAAB. The Force 3 and Force GT use the exact same PCB though. In terms of its specifications, the Force 3 is only marginally slower than the Force GT according to Corsair, with max reads and writes of 550MB/s and 510MB/s. The lower performance is due to firmware differences in the drives and the Force 3’s use of asynchronous NAND. We’re not going to cover the low-level technical differences between the two types of NAND, but suffice it to say asynchronous NAND flash is more affordable, but it also doesn’t perform as well when fed incompressible data through its SandForce controller.

For those wondering, this is the drive Corsair recalled last month due to stability issues. This particular drive is the updated revision, which is what consumers will be able to find on store shelves currently. The issues that forced the recall have been resolved. Throughout testing the Force 3 behaved perfectly.

Tags: SSD, OCZ, Corsair, Storage, Patriot, Agility, solid state, Crucial, vertex, SATA III, wildfire, force, M4

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com