Corsair Force 120 (F120) SSD review

Things have never been so dynamic and on the move on the storage market as they are now; where a year or two ago our heart skipped a beat when we installed a blazingly fast WD VelociRaptor in our PC's, while these days the biggest, hottest and most trendy gadget to have inside your PC is an SSD. Next to phat CPU or GPU upgrade an SSD really is the best thing to have inside your machine as it eliminates one of the biggest bottlenecks of computers, yep ... the traditional mechanical HDD. See, Windows XP/ Vista 7 clogs up your OS, loads of data loads and saves are performed each and every second, and as such your OS is continuously sitting and waiting around until the HDD finishes the job the OS gave it. And that's where SSDs are just so good and really shine at; blazing speeds eliminating exactly that bottleneck and making sure that your applications are loaded in a snap.

It's been a rough start though, initially everybody was convinced about the sheer brute performance of the 1st gen SSDs. Then we started noticing some child deceases with the first series, which were quickly solved by Indilinx, realizing SSDs with cache memory were the absolute way to go. And from there on things certainly took off. Today we have SSDs with read and write performance close to 280~285 MB/sec, and you know what ... it's only going to get better in the years to come. We see SATA 6G slowly getting implemented, higher channel based controllers, price cuts and larger volume sizes .. well at least that is my personal vision of what is to come. But where we are right now isn't too shabby either. Top dog SSDs are equipped with either an Indilinx controller or a SandForce based controller.

Thus far we have tested a handful of SandForce based products, and though the first series with the initial SF-1500 controller did show some issues, the SF-1200 controller based products were showing really interesting gains in performance. The SandForce based products are by all means no little wonders and miracles in each and every segment, but in some segments they make a distinct difference opposed to JMicron and Indilinx products.

So today the turn goes to Corsair. Recently they've released the 'Force series' SSD, and not long ago we tested their F100 SSD with some mixed feelings due to issues most likely caused by firmware issues. Corsair however was keen to send us the SSD that apparently already replaced that model, as such today we will look at the all new F120.

The Force series of SSDs were initially available in capacities of 100GB and 200GB and support the TRIM command in Windows 7, which helps to maintain optimal performance over the drives lifetime. Corsair also added 60, 120 and 240 GB sized SSDs in the very same Force range.

":Enable yoda voice: the Force is strong with this one", let's head on over to the next page where we'll startup today's review of the Force 120 SSD from Corsair.