Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD

[makaveli-313]

Hello !

So I've been thinking of getting a SSD, I'm completely uneducated on SSDs and now I have some questions :

1.) Now I did some research in my local market and for some reason the Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD is cheaper by almost 50 of your US$ compared to 120GB SSDs by Samsung etc. I read a review by Legit reviews on this drive and it seems to trail ever so slighly behind other drives in some tests and on par in others. Is there any reason this drive is so much cheaper ? or is it only a local thing ?

2.) Which is current the best value for money SSD and which is the best performance one ? SATA and PCI-E.

3.) Do you suggest getting 2 60GB models and putting them in raid for near 1GBps ? if not why ?

4.) Drives locally cost more M.R.P than the ones sold in the states. Do you have any recommendations for me ? I'm looking to spend no more than 110 of your US$.

Thanks in advance.

[DC]

Go google the word SANDFORCE - you may find that will help.

[PommieB]

It depends what your going to do with the ssd drive, if you want a drive with better benchmarks then you'd buy the Sandforce drive, benchmarks aren't everything and real life use is a lot different, the Samsung's a very good drive and the benchmarks it lags behind in make little difference to the performance anyway.

Sandforce drives are great drives if you don't have any problems with them, they become a nightmare when you do, You should never buy a ssd on benchmarks alone or on one set of benchmarks.

You should also look at the Marvell controlled drives like the M4, it's a better drive for the inexperienced user and on the whole is like the Samsung and both are more reliable than Sandforce controlled drives. The Samsung actually benchmarks better than the Sandforce drives in real world gaming, the differences are small, but the Samsung is better at it.

Me I prefer reliability, so you won't see me using any of the present generation sandforce drives in my computers, Marvell controllers have served me well.

Price + Reliability you buy Crucial M4 or another Marvell controlled ssd drive, you want cheap and better benchmark performance and bragging rights you buy the Corsair, Choice is yours.

What would I buy, the M4 because of it's great price, great performance and reliability, the Samsungs as good but generally too dear, I'd have to be broke to buy one of this generation of Sandforce controlled drives, that being said the Corsair isn't too bad. Here's a benchmark from the Hardware Canucks Website.

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...sd-review.html

Here's some reviews on the Samsug 830.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...mode,3034.html
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1795/1/
http://www.storagereview.com/samsung...30_raid_review

The Crucial M4 benchmarks are all over the Web.

Raid up to yourself, you'll get better sequential figures with raid0 which will give a noticeably slightly better performance but the important benchmarks can be worse. It doesn't really matter what ssd drive you buy for use with a OS anyway, you gain little or nothing in boot times, could even be worse. Best of luck with your choice.

[makaveli-313]

ok pommie
So I'll be using this as my 'Installation drive'.
Basically Windows will go on this along with software installations and game installs. I'm looking for quick boot times, quick load times when loading games and quick software installs.
Now, When you say reliability are you talking about complete hardware failure or just a data loss ? If the latter then as I keep setup files it shouldn't be an issue. I do not want complete hardware failure :P.
I await your response.

[PommieB]

Reliability can mean both, and it can happen with all ssd's or hdd's, but the former is more of a problem, you might gain the odd second or two in boot times with a Sanforce controlled drive depending on your hardware, hardware as a much greater effect on a ssd's performance than conventional hard drives and you've got a greater chance of complete failure with a ssd drive. so you a regular back-up strategy with ssd drives.

The way ssd's are designed it's difficult or almost impossible to recover data from a ssd drive that fails ( hardware failure ). And I wouldn't assume if you've had 3 or 4 months trouble free use of a ssd drive that it's not going to fail, it quite possible the drive might fail 12 months down the track, it's no different than any other solid state hardware in that respect.

Reliability of ssd drives, according organizations that use large quantities of both, is it's very similar to hdd's, the different with ssd's is the access times, which makes them ideal for caching raid arrays, these guy's use expensive enterprise ssd drives, I don't see the same reliability with cheap client drives, reliability is hard to judge anyway.

We can give you some idea of what ssd to buy, still doesn't mean you might not get a bad drive. You need to guard against complete hardware failure by having a good back-up strategy, it's no different with hard drives with the exception that in most cases you can recover your data, even data recovery centers have difficulty recovering data from ssd drives, even though they say they are getting better at it.

You need to do your research until your satisfied with your choice of ssd drive, it depends what you intend to use it for, it depends what's at the top of your list, if it's performance then two ssd drives in raid0 or PCIe ssd raid card maybe the way to go, reliability, then maybe a single quality ssd drive might be better.

Sorry about the long answers, but you are asking difficult questions when it comes to reliability.

[makaveli-313]

Originally Posted by PommieB

Reliability can mean both, and it can happen with all ssd's or hdd's, but the former is more of a problem, you might gain the odd second or two in boot times with a Sanforce controlled drive depending on your hardware, hardware as a much greater effect on a ssd's performance than conventional hard drives and you've got a greater chance of complete failure with a ssd drive. so you a regular back-up strategy with ssd drives.

The way ssd's are designed it's difficult or almost impossible to recover data from a ssd drive that fails ( hardware failure ). And I wouldn't assume if you've had 3 or 4 months trouble free use of a ssd drive that it's not going to fail, it quite possible the drive might fail 12 months down the track, it's no different than any other solid state hardware in that respect.

Reliability of ssd drives, according organizations that use large quantities of both, is it's very similar to hdd's, the different with ssd's is the access times, which makes them ideal for caching raid arrays, these guy's use expensive enterprise ssd drives, I don't see the same reliability with cheap client drives, reliability is hard to judge anyway.

We can give you some idea of what ssd to buy, still doesn't mean you might not get a bad drive. You need to guard against complete hardware failure by having a good back-up strategy, it's no different with hard drives with the exception that in most cases you can recover your data, even data recovery centers have difficulty recovering data from ssd drives, even though they say they are getting better at it.

You need to do your research until your satisfied with your choice of ssd drive, it depends what you intend to use it for, it depends what's at the top of your list, if it's performance then two ssd drives in raid0 or PCIe ssd raid card maybe the way to go, reliability, then maybe a single quality ssd drive might be better.

Sorry about the long answers, but you are asking difficult questions when it comes to reliability.

No I like your answers...they are informative.
I just realised that I'm on the old quad core mobos...I think that means I'm on SATA II right (anyway to check from windows ?). I might as well get a slower more reliable one as I'll me limited to 3Gbps anyways so one last question. Apart from the Samsung 830 do you have any other recommendations for drives that are reliable ?

[PommieB]

If your new to ssd drives, My pick would be the Crucial M4 for price, performance and reliability, the Samsung's is a good performing drive and reliable but over priced, you could buy the Corsair and never have a ounce of trouble. For an OS drive, without trouble they are top drawer with overall performance.

The biggest downside to the M4 and Samsung are the lower write sequential speeds with drives below 256gb, there just isn't enough memory to fill all the pipelines when moving data. New firmware as improved these figures considerably with the 128gb M4, not so much with the 64gb drive. This problem is less noticeable on the smaller sized Sandforce controlled ssd drives like the Corsair Force 3 because of the toggle memory.

Of course this all changes when you test for sustained speed, a typical Sandforce controlled drive with Asynchronous memory, write speeds can drop to 170MB/s ( saw this in a sustained write test on a benchmarking website on a recently released Sandforce controlled drive with quality Asynchronous memory, these were considered excellent sustained speeds for the type of data used in the test ), the more expensive toggle memory can reach 270 MB/s. All I can say the M4 trailed the sandforce drives with the Toshiba toggle memory, but not by much, but bettered the cheaper drive with the Asychronous memory by quite a bit. Be interesting to see what speeds you get on sata2 as you'll be saturating the sata2 controller.

Running a OS with a SSD drive, write figures have less importance, you'll still find only seconds difference in boot times between the top drives, regardless of the controller. This is drives used with the same set-up on the same hardware.

Sequential speeds aren't that important, it's the sustained speeds that are important, with these speeds the Marvell controllers are as good or better than most Sandforce controlled drives with Asynchronous memory, can equal Sandforce drives with Synchronous memory, but lag behind slightly, the Sandforce drives like the Corsair with the top drawer Toshiba toggle memory, so it's really down to reliability. Once you look at the figures for the 256gb drive the figures are even closer.

I wouldn't worry about whether your running sata2, sure you are not going to get sata3 speeds, but sooner or later you'll update your computer to sata 3 you won't be disappointed with your sata3 drive as you would with a sata2, the M4 will work very well at sata2 speeds because of the lightening fast access speed. If your strapped for cash then it's up to you, the sata2 drives are older technology, I think it's bad advice to drop back to sata2 ssd drives, just because your running an older sata2 computer. That's only my opinion and not everybody would agree.

Make sure that your computer is in AHCI mode when you set up the ssd drive and have the ssd drive connected to one of the native sata connectors, regardless of whether it's sata2 or sata3, the overall opinions from experts now is to do a clean install and start fresh, I cloned without problems and got rated performance speeds on Vista, but I did a clean install when I updated to win7, new performance was pretty much the same, I have a lot of experience with cloning, might not be a good idea for someone without experience.

I'm sure there will be people posting there preferences, some will prefer the "faster" controller, others, the Crucial M4 with the Marvell controller and others, drives like the Samsung. Look forward to hearing there opinions and experiences, I'm sure the OP will be equally interested.

[makaveli-313]

Thank you for the detailed responses. You have been very helpful .

[PommieB]

No problems, feel free to keep asking questions, I'll give you fairest answer I can.