There has never been a better time to pick up an SSD boot drive with many of the leading manufacturers releasing 30-40GB units at very reasonable prices. KitGuru has already looked at the Intel X25-V 40GB and we were very impressed with the price to performance ratio, especially when set into a Raid 0 configuration.
Today we continue along similar lines and take a look at the newest Corsair 40GB SSD – the F40. These are retailing in the UK now for £95 inc vat, so for under £200 you could end up with a killer Raid 0 boot drive based around the class leading Sandforce SF-1200 controller. A single 120GB SSD makes for a great boot drive, but two 40GB's are faster, and cheaper. It's a dead cert win-win.
Corsair kindly sent us two of the F40's and we decided to recreate our previous test environment and put them head to head against the Intel X25 V's in Raid 0. The difference with the Corsair 40GB drives is that there is no performance hit like other SSD's when they reduce the number of Flash ICs to reduce the cost.
Yep, this is going to get dirty. Just the way we like it.
Corsair Force 40GB F40 | |
Capacity | 40GB |
Controller | Sandforce SF-1200 |
Maximum Read | 285MB/s |
Maximum Write | 275 MB/s |
Sustained Write | 250 MB/s |
Max I/O Per Second (IOPS) | 50,000 IOPS (4kb file) |
NAND Flash | Latest generation Sanforce controller Multi Level Cell (MLC) |
Interface | Sata II |
Trim Support | Yes – requires Windows 7 |
Warranty | 2 Years |