Corsair Force F40 40GB SSD Review – in Raid 0

Our testing shows that the Corsair F40 40GB SSD's are drives you need to pay attention to, especially as they are delivering the same levels of performance as larger drives in the Sandforce family. Many smaller solid state drives perform much slower than their bigger family members due to reductions in Flash IC count.

The Corsair F40 40GB drives do not pay any speed penalty.

Read and write performance is as good as we would expect from a Sandforce drive with the added benefit of incredibly competitive pricing. These drives are retailing for under £100 each (inc VAT) in the UK right now which means that for under £200 you could be running a system capable of delivering sustained rates of around 500mb/s, real world. It makes me wonder why more people aren't opting for a Raid solution rather than a larger single drive.

When we look at single drive pricing, a Crucial RealSSD C300 128GB retails for around £260 in the UK, the same goes for the 120GB Vertex 2 units from OCZ. Two of these Corsair F40 40GB units in Raid 0 not only mean you would be saving around £70, but you would be getting significantly faster read and write speeds. Granted you lose some capacity, but I have been able to run many systems with a single 40GB unit as a boot drive.

Two in Raid 0 is such a tempting proposition for a lightning quick boot drive in Windows 7. Those of you still unfortunate enough to be running a mechanical drive for Windows 7 boot could be reducing your start up time from over a minute to 22 seconds, as our testing shows.

We love the Intel X25-V 40GB drives, but these Corsair F40's are much faster, and our testing shows that if you want an SSD solution and have £200 in your pocket then this is the best performance configuration on the market right now, without question.

KitGuru says: Raid 0 with Corsair F40 is delicious, if you have the funds, make sure to give it a whirl because we are confident you won't be disappointed.

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