It doesn’t matter how good any of the synthetic suites are, the real meat of the testing has to be under absolute real world conditions. This proves difficult as to record results we have to narrow down fluctuation. Therefore while we would say these are the most useful results to get from this review, there is always going to be a slight margin for error – its not absolutely scientific.
Firstly we installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit Edition onto each of the drives, no programs were installed, just the operating system and a clean update from Microsoft with all patches and security fixes. The machine was then shut down and once started up we recorded boot times – until we reached a working desktop. We used a digital watch for this and repeated the test five times for each drive – once we had these five results we averaged the results and took that for the final figure. We also included a standard £70 Western Digital 1TB hard drive for comparison purposes.
22 seconds is an incredible end result for the F40 40GB drives in Raid 0, this is 2 seconds faster than the Crucial C300 256GB drive, which costs well in excess of £500!
Snow Leopard 10.6.4 Boot Times
Not everyone uses Windows 7, and although TRIM is only supported by this Operating system, I like to expand results a little when possible. I therefore used my Macintosh MacBook pro 17 inch, Generation 5.1 which is based around a 2.93ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 9600m graphics. There is 8GB of DDR3 ram in this machine with a full 3 Gigabit link speed over the nVidia MCP79 AHCI. I also enabled the full 64bit Kernel and Extensions – if you want to read more, check out this article.
Before we show the results it is worth pointing out that we don’t expect to see gains like we did on the Windows 7 platform, because our Macintosh controller is limited to Sata 3Gbps. We also can’t run any Raid 0 configurations as the machine only supports a single sata drive.
The Corsair F40 in single drive configuration puts in a good showing at 16.5 seconds, around the same time as other bigger Sandforce drives such as the Agility 2 which we reviewed this week.
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August 11, 2010
#1
over half a gigabyte per second performance rates, hilarious. love it ! I remember when getting 30mb/s was considered awesome and it cost more than these.
August 11, 2010
#2
Damn Zardon do you ever sleep buddy? Great article and this seems to be a sweet price to performance point, under 200 for this? yes please. Sandforce controller is a very well balanced solution.
August 11, 2010
#3
Very good too see such amazing performance and at such a modest price considering. I agree with the conclusion ‘delicious’ comment. it really is such a sweet time to buy technology.
August 11, 2010
#4
These make a nice combination. whats next? four drives ? :p
August 11, 2010
#5
Dear god man, give me some of that lovely hardware you get daily, its not fair!
August 11, 2010
#6
OMG, my dreams have been answered I was wanting this EXACT review for a week now. This is my next purchase, but I do need to stop reading this site, I get envy with all the wicked products you get.
August 11, 2010
#7
It is interesting to see the real world tests at the end, its hard to really measure real world tests with such a configuration, as even a 500 MEG video file would be copied as you just dragged it.
August 11, 2010
#8
Under £200, that is awesome. 40gb is a bit too small I think, so its nice you double the size and performance. will get these from OCUK.
August 11, 2010
#9
two SSDs reviews in a day? spolit for choice
August 11, 2010
#10
Sandforce controller is wicked. now we need a raid 0 review of the 256 GB Crucial REALSSDs
only 1k of SSD, bargain !
August 11, 2010
#11
It is refreshing to see that performance isnt butchered due to going for a small size. sandforce rocks.
August 11, 2010
#12
Lovely, but I need a new video card first. will be next on my list, but single drive is enough for me,.
August 11, 2010
#13
I was waiting for the crucial drives to come out at this size, but the marvell controller will not scale well at this size I dont think. 128gb for instance is poor compared to 256 unit.
August 11, 2010
#14
Well that was rather interesting, over 500mb/s? wtf, speechless. not too shabby for 190 quid.
August 11, 2010
#15
Corsair make such brilliant products, love their power supplies too. Waiting on a 850W review
August 11, 2010
#16
Wow thats killer performance aint it ? Price is great. I dont think I would buy a single drive after reading this. raid 0 seems the way to go.
August 11, 2010
#17
The intel drives have dropped in price, probably since these came out
August 11, 2010
#18
Corsair have a good product here, seems the price point is good also. I wonder how they are selling, I dont know anyone who has bought an ssd.
August 11, 2010
#19
SSDs are finally becoming affordable. they really DO make a huge difference, I always thought it was nonsense until I bought one for my laptop. it makes it feel like a new machine.
August 11, 2010
#20
Anyone here got one of these drives, id like another opinion
August 11, 2010
#21
Good on Corsair, its forced the price of the intel drives another £10
August 11, 2010
#22
Are SSDs really that big a deal? I can generate wait a few seconds.
August 11, 2010
#23
It depends how much you use your computer and what you are doing on it. for surfing the net, and random things, might be not needed, but if you are seriously using it, its like one of the best upgrades you can give it.
August 11, 2010
#24
I hear corsair are working on a new controller with indilinx. any truth in this?
August 12, 2010
#25
what about performance detoriating?
with RAID,trim is not possiblle…
August 12, 2010
#26
I guess reinstalls would need to be taken into consideration for systems with this. That said, I think for the audience with the knowledge to Raid 0 drives they would reinstall their OS after a few months anyway. I know I do. every 4 months or so.
August 12, 2010
#27
Actually Intel did release support for TRIM in raid o or raid 1. Not sure about these corsair units.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2010/03/23/intel-releases-trim-for-raid/1
August 13, 2010
#28
Tigerdirect has these on sale right now for $99.99 after $30 mail in rebate. I’m picking one up tonight.
Thanks for the review..