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The Corsair Force 3 arrives in a stylishly designed black and blue accented box with the name and size of the product listed on the front.
Corsair supply the drive inside a plastic protective container with a Corsair branded 3.5 inch bay mount inside another container.
The Force 3 120GB is supplied in a plain black chassis with the size listed on the front. A fairly standard chassis design. It is opened by removing four small screws on the rear. Please be aware if you do this, you invalidate the warranty. We don’t really care, but if you buy one, you should.
The 120GB model we are testing today has a NAND flash partition of 16 ICs onto the PCB. The Sandforce Controller is marked SF-2281VB1-SDC, and is made in Taiwan.
Technically, new 25nm NAND FLASH memory has a reduced overall lifespan from 10,000 upwards to around 5,000 program/erase cycles. Industry insiders have hinted that consumer grade 25nm NAND flash memory will have a slightly lower lifespan, between 3,000 and 4,000 program/erase cycles.
While this sounds concerning, if you work out that under normal conditions only between 20-35 full SSD write cycles will be used each year, there is plenty of life in the product. Drive wearing protection also helps to ensure longer lasting flash memory. Thankfully, there is also full TRIM support.
As many already know Sandforce controllers use real time compression. The controllers store a ‘representation’ of your data, not the actual data itself which is achieved by creating a partition of the available NAND flash memory. It can handle around 63 MB/s from one of the eight available channels.
