today I have a very cool and interesting new product to unbox this is a Corsair
solid state drive and as you can see from the sticker applied at the bottom
of the box it is a 4 series 60 gig drive
so the four series um very creatively
named because of the sand Force controller that it uses is a
state-of-the-art SSD that has the fastest reads and writs available on the
market in many common applications now there's one that is a little bit faster
in some situations it's a SATA 3 SSD from uh crucial but there have been some
firmware issues with that and it's sort of debatable whether it's worth the risk
or not sandforce on the other hand has proven to be a very stable platform and
so that's what we are going to be having a look at today so of course there
includes a couple of different accessories with their uh four series
SSD first of all they have a 2 and 1/2 to 3 and 1/2 in drive adapter so this is
just it's a pretty pretty bog standard one you can see how it works here so
you've got four screws to attach the drive to the adapter here you can see it
mounts off to the side a little bit and then you've got four screws to mount the
drive adapter which you can oh it looks like you can only mount it by from the
side so if you have a a hard drive mounting system that requires the holes
on the bottom you won't be able to use this adapter you might have to get a different one but uh yeah you've got the
all of the screws included that you need anyway what's so special about the four
series drives is that along with the new sand Force controller comes a couple of
cool features first thing to notice is that this is a 60 gig Drive the original
sand Force drives were in 50 100 and 200
GB capacities but what has been done with the latest firmwares is it's been
improved to 60120 and 240 gig capacities
because they're using slightly less spare area now spare area gives you a
little bit of extra space to uh tweak performance but some companies were able
to find ways to tweak the performance of the drive free up some spare area and
still get the same performance out of a 60 as you could out of a 50 and out of a
120 as you could out of a 100 Gig drive so of course there has kind of a neat
finish to their drives you can see the side is sort of just a plain uh a plain
sort of uh matte finish whereas the top is actually got like a nice brushed
finish to it so if you're mounting this drive somewhere where you're going to be able to see it you'll definitely
appreciate the little touches like that that make it look nicer now cool thing
about the four series drives again is the sequential reads and sequential
rights as well as the random read and random right performance now this four
series Drive can actually write at up to
275 megabytes per second sequentially it can read it up to 285 megabytes per
second sequentially now it used to be when we only had drives like the ocz
vertex this is a gen one vertex that
used mlc flash now mlc flash means that
it can actually store Two Bits of data where SLC single
SLC flash can store only one bit so mlc
is obviously much cheaper because you get double the capacity that you would
of out of each flash cell that you have to um manufacture so mlc flash
inherently cannot write as fast as SLC Flash the reason I keep holding this
drive up is this is an Intel x25 e 32
gig drive this uses SLC Flash and what happens is SLC can be written to much
much faster but the four series controller actually uses special
algorithms to compress the data as you're writing it to allow it to write
285 G or rather 275 Megs but actually it's only writing
less data to the drive because it's compressing it and then decompressing it
whenever you're reading it on the fly so it does make for a more complicated more
expensive controller but you save money because instead of spending four times
the amount on SLC flash or well four times by the time it hits a shelf it
only costs double but rather than spending so much more on the flash
you're spending more on the controller which is relatively minor so thank you
for checking out my unboxing of the Corsair 4 Series f60 SSD and uh
hopefully you stay tuned I'm going to be doing something on my ncx tech tips
Channel with this drive so don't forget to subscribe Linus Tech tips as well as
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