Corsair Force Series 60GB 2.5" SSD Solid State Sandforce Drive Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
883 words · ~4 min read
0:00
today I have a very cool and interesting new product to unbox this is a Corsair
0:04
solid state drive and as you can see from the sticker applied at the bottom
0:07
of the box it is a 4 series 60 gig drive
0:11
so the four series um very creatively
0:14
named because of the sand Force controller that it uses is a
0:19
state-of-the-art SSD that has the fastest reads and writs available on the
0:24
market in many common applications now there's one that is a little bit faster
0:29
in some situations it's a SATA 3 SSD from uh crucial but there have been some
0:34
firmware issues with that and it's sort of debatable whether it's worth the risk
0:39
or not sandforce on the other hand has proven to be a very stable platform and
0:43
so that's what we are going to be having a look at today so of course there
0:46
includes a couple of different accessories with their uh four series
0:49
SSD first of all they have a 2 and 1/2 to 3 and 1/2 in drive adapter so this is
0:56
just it's a pretty pretty bog standard one you can see how it works here so
1:00
you've got four screws to attach the drive to the adapter here you can see it
1:05
mounts off to the side a little bit and then you've got four screws to mount the
1:09
drive adapter which you can oh it looks like you can only mount it by from the
1:13
side so if you have a a hard drive mounting system that requires the holes
1:17
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
1:21
all of the screws included that you need anyway what's so special about the four
1:25
series drives is that along with the new sand Force controller comes a couple of
1:30
cool features first thing to notice is that this is a 60 gig Drive the original
1:35
sand Force drives were in 50 100 and 200
1:39
GB capacities but what has been done with the latest firmwares is it's been
1:43
improved to 60120 and 240 gig capacities
1:47
because they're using slightly less spare area now spare area gives you a
1:52
little bit of extra space to uh tweak performance but some companies were able
1:57
to find ways to tweak the performance of the drive free up some spare area and
2:02
still get the same performance out of a 60 as you could out of a 50 and out of a
2:06
120 as you could out of a 100 Gig drive so of course there has kind of a neat
2:10
finish to their drives you can see the side is sort of just a plain uh a plain
2:15
sort of uh matte finish whereas the top is actually got like a nice brushed
2:20
finish to it so if you're mounting this drive somewhere where you're going to be able to see it you'll definitely
2:24
appreciate the little touches like that that make it look nicer now cool thing
2:28
about the four series drives again is the sequential reads and sequential
2:33
rights as well as the random read and random right performance now this four
2:36
series Drive can actually write at up to
2:39
275 megabytes per second sequentially it can read it up to 285 megabytes per
2:44
second sequentially now it used to be when we only had drives like the ocz
2:48
vertex this is a gen one vertex that
2:52
used mlc flash now mlc flash means that
2:55
it can actually store Two Bits of data where SLC single
3:00
SLC flash can store only one bit so mlc
3:04
is obviously much cheaper because you get double the capacity that you would
3:07
of out of each flash cell that you have to um manufacture so mlc flash
3:14
inherently cannot write as fast as SLC Flash the reason I keep holding this
3:17
drive up is this is an Intel x25 e 32
3:21
gig drive this uses SLC Flash and what happens is SLC can be written to much
3:26
much faster but the four series controller actually uses special
3:30
algorithms to compress the data as you're writing it to allow it to write
3:36
285 G or rather 275 Megs but actually it's only writing
3:42
less data to the drive because it's compressing it and then decompressing it
3:46
whenever you're reading it on the fly so it does make for a more complicated more
3:50
expensive controller but you save money because instead of spending four times
3:55
the amount on SLC flash or well four times by the time it hits a shelf it
3:59
only costs double but rather than spending so much more on the flash
4:02
you're spending more on the controller which is relatively minor so thank you
4:05
for checking out my unboxing of the Corsair 4 Series f60 SSD and uh
4:11
hopefully you stay tuned I'm going to be doing something on my ncx tech tips
4:15
Channel with this drive so don't forget to subscribe Linus Tech tips as well as
4:19
subscribe to my ncixcom channnel for all
4:22
of the latest tech updates