Corsair Force 3 120 GB

Corsair Force 3 120GB review

One hundred and seventy English pounds for a 120GB SSD powered by the latest SandForce SF-2200 controller and 25nm NAND flash memory? Looks like a bit of a bargain, particularly compared to 120GB-ish drives with the Marvell 9174 controller, such as the Intel 510 and Plextor M2S. For the most part, Corsair's new Force 3 continues to look like a great deal when the stick-poking forensics kick off. You get the same SF-2281 controller found in several much more expensive drives. That means SATA 6Gbps support and clever DuraWrite data compression that reduces traffic to the flash memory cells, theoretically making for more performance and better drive longevity. In fact, to be strictly accurate, data compression is just one part of the DuraWrite feature set that contributes to reduced write amplification. To give an example of the overall impact, SandForce says a typical installation of Windows 7 and Office 2007 involves 25GB of writes to a standard hard disk or SSD. Thanks to DuraWrite, this is reduced to just 11GB. Amplified Due to the way data is stored in blocks, with a normal SSD you'd expect much more than 25GB of data to be written to the flash cells, hence the term 'write amplification'.