Corsair Force F40 40GB SSD Review – in Raid 0

1. Introduction2. The Corsair Force 40GB F403. Testing Methodology4. ATTO Disk Benchmark5. AS SSD6. SiSoft Sandra Professional7. HD Tach8. IOMeter9. Real World Testing10. Closing Thoughts11. View All Pages

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

Our review samples arrived in large white boxes with a blue Corsair logo emblazoned on the front.

The box art follows a similar path to the other Corsair products we have reviewed lately. Clean, corporate and very attractive.

The bundle is spartan, as would be expected at this price point. The drive however is securely packaged in a hard plastic sleeve.

We always enjoy the Corsair reviewers guides, this one is particularly amusing as their ‘test system' was intended to duplicate an ‘average' user's system. Comprising ‘just' an Intel 980x, 12GB of DDR3 and ATI HD5870. I am sure everyone reading this has a similar system also.

The F40 is a plain black unit with a brushed aluminum rear – I deliberately put it under high intensity flash to capture the lovely textured appearance.

Opening the shell we can see the memory chips and the Sandforce SF1200 controller which takes center stage in the middle of the PCB. Even though we have no information on this I am pretty sure the NAND memory is Micron based (marked 29F32G08).

For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4 which you can get yourself over here. We try to use free programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.

This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.

We tested the Intel and Corsair drives in both single mode and in Raid 0. There is a good chance that people buying one of these drives might in future add another for an inexpensive performance boost.

We also like to test Raid 0 when we get a chance!

Corsair F40 40GB x 2

Comparison Drives:
OCZ Agility 2 100GB
Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB (with Highpoint RocketRAID 620 SATA controller)
OCZ Vertex 2 100GB
Buffalo 128GB Microstation
Intel X25-V 40GB (+Raid 0)
Kingston SSDNow V+ Series 128GB SSD
OCZ Vertex 128GB
Intel X-25M 160GB SSD
Corsair P128 SSD

CPU: Intel Core i7 875k @ 4.2ghz
Cooler: Noctua NH 14D
Motherboard: Intel DP55WG
Hard Drive: Western Digital 1TB
Memory: Crucial Ballistix Tracer 1600mhz (4gb)
Sata Interface: Highpoint RocketRAID 620 SATA Controller
PSU: Enermax 1250w Revolution
Graphics: Zotac GTX465
Chassis: Silverstone Raven 2
Operating System: Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate
Monitor: LaCie 730 30 inch LED screen

All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration. Median averages were extrapolated from the results – this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.

The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.

These results are simply staggering with the Corsair F40 in Raid 0 scoring almost 560MB/s in read performance and around 516MB/s with write performance. These have shattered the Intel Raid 0 figures by a clear margin, especially when writing data.

The AS SSD benchmark is another free utility which was created specifically with SSD’s in mind. It delivers a plethora of tests across sequential read and write and also places random read and write loads across a specific area of the drive. This is a good tool to use in conjunction with Windows 7 as it mirrors a very real world set of conditions.

Once again the Corsair F40 40GB drives are paving new performance levels in the AS SSD benchmark suite.

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

You can begin to see the trend already, with the Corsair F40 40GB drives leading the way by a considerable margin. The read and write performance is simply staggering.

HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives (ZIP/JAZZ), flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device possible.

In Raid 0 the F40 drives in Raid 0 score over 400MB/s with a burst speed of just under 540MB/s. In single mode the drive gets around 240 MB/s.

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and announced at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) on February 17, 1998 – since then it got wide spread within the industry. Meanwhile Intel has discontinued work on Iometer and it was given to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). The project is now driven by an international group of individuals who are continuously improving, porting and extending the product.

The Intel drive really doesn't stand much of a chance in this test thanks to the incredible IOPS performance of the Sandforce controller.

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.

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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