The new Force Series F40 SSD from Corsair would make an excellent boot drive, the company claims.
Corsair has announced new additions to its Force series of solid-state drives - including a budget-friendly 40GB version it describes as being a perfect boot drive.
The well-received Force series - which previously comprised of 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB models - are based around the popular SandForce SF-1200 SSD controller, which offers impressive sequential read speeds of around 280MB/s and write speeds of 270MB/s along with almost 200MB/s random write speeds.
Corsair's John Beekley, vice president of technical marketing, made the claim that "
in our testing in the Corsair Lab, we found that the new Force Series 40GB SSD outperform competitive SSDs from Intel and Kingston by a wide margin," while stating that SandForce's technology means that "
there is almost no performance penalty when reducing the capacity of the drive" - allowing the company to produce the 40GB edition.
As well as the 40GB budget edition, Corsair has added another two models to the line-up - an 80GB version and a larger 160GB model. All models match the three-year warranty which comes with the line as standard.
Due to launch world-wide in August, UK pricing has not yet been provided by the company - but US RRPs put the 40GB model at $129.99 (around £86), the 80GB at $229.99 (around £152), and the 160GB at $449.99 (around £297.)
Do you believe that smaller SSDs are the way forward for the technology, or should Corsair be concentrating on upping capacities and lowering the cost-per-gig to better compete with traditional mechanical drives? Share your thoughts over in
the forums.
15 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyAnd I agree with "yakyb". If £86 for a drive is still to expensive,
Then I saw the currency.
I agree.
Anyway, please accept my deepest apology, I didn't mean to offend your sensitive souls.
sorry is that meant to be sarcasm i'm not sure
my point is that traditional HDDs are roughly 4p per GB until SSDs can reach £1 - £1.50 per GB i will feel that they are too expensive for me
i think that as technology improves and price of regular memory drops to a more reasonable level we will soon reach this but it is still a little soon just yet (although the C300 64GB is tempting)
what was the comment?
My point is that for linux you only need small drive so relative cost is not so important as long as the absolute cost is low and the size of the drive is sufficient for your needs.
This concept can be compared to cost-benefit analysis in economics where marginal benefit of an aditional unit of whatever it is you consume will decrease with consumption. You only need so many GBs so at one point you will stop caring how much additional GB cost as you won't just need it.
E.g according to your logic you would buy 100tb drive for £3000 just because relative cost is 3p per GB. But no rational person would buy that drive because normal user doesn't need 100tb.
So I would buy 10gb ssd drive for ubuntu even if it costs £25 (£2.5 per GB) because I get the speed of the "big" (128gb) drive but it would only cost £25.
They already have http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/07/21/crucial-realssd-c300-64gb-ssd-review/1
I agree with koli if I understand correctly, the price to me is more important than the price per GB, I don't see SSD's as a replacement to HDD's so for me they're only for high performance random read/writes so buying anything bigger than 60GB is wasted on me as it would end up being a storage device more than a boot drive. I'd be more than happy to drop £100-£150 on a 60GB drive like the Vertex 2E or the 64GB C300 because they're more like a powerful graphics card or a sound card upgrade, you might not need it but if you want better graphics settings or better audio then you buy one, I want an SSD to have better boot times, better load times for my programs and if my operating system is doing something requiring accessing lots of different places at once I don't want to feel like I'm getting less response and general slowdown. I'll buy an SSD for a faster all round experience and use my HDD's for games and storage of media and other assorted crap that clutters my 1TB spinpoint which is now at 786MiB :(
Just my 2p
Also according to Anandtech since kernal 2.6.33 Linux supports trim so as koli says a 40GB or smaller would be perfect for most linux distro's since you'd no longer degrade faster than someone using Windows 7 ;)
Hmm that looks tempting. Tbh I was expecting someone to come in with some cheap-and-not-so-cheerful SSD under 2/GB that wouldn't be worth a look, but I'm glad to hear it's going in the right direction with the performance models as well.
Still, I'm not sure if that would be enough for me. Thanks mostly to Steam, my boot/programs partition is just over 170GB. I'm sure I could cut that down a lot as there are a lot of games I've got installed that I don't play, but even if I choose carefully I think I could struggle with a 120GB drive. For me the main advantage of an SSD would be slower load times particularly in games, so if I can't take advantage of that properly then it's not such a wise investment.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/07/21/crucial-realssd-c300-64gb-ssd-review/1
The same review is there. :( Where's the love?
EDITed out above..
Because they had a table showing the £ per GB that is visible as soon as you open the page, I was linking to the table not the review :P
If you wanted I could've posted the news article which shows the same table but I already had the review in a tab.