Corsair Force 3, the best 120gb SSD right now?

5 ^+1...

I still believe the OCZ Vertex 3 is the best SATA III drive & best SSD outside of the OCZ RevoDrive X2

Better? I doubt it. Better price/performance ratio? could be. I also look to Anand as he seems to be one of the leading authorities on SSDs. Although one thing I have noticed is he doesn't review every single drive that comes along. It looks as though the Force 3 is very competitive with similar 120GB drives. Considering the controller, I'd say its a safe bet.

I am personally waiting for the top performance. Currently that is the Vertex 3, but we'll see when fall rolls around.

Yeah... I read through some of the threads and it looks like a possible recall is underway to address the issue.

Your image has a few flaws (though the outcome is correct on the m4 and Vertex 3 being the better drives...

1) The Agility 3 is set in IDE mode, which will effect performance.
2) The C300 is running the Marvell controller, which is known it doesn't have the same throughput as the Intel RST SATA III ports, so it's performance is limited (though not by much for the C300).

As for the Corsair Force 3... I can't speak on, as I haven't seen any real benchmarks to compare against.

Alright, thanks the info! I'd imagine the controller would make quite a difference, I also noticed that the used diskspace makes an enormous difference. It's a shame though that there's not an integral and reliable comparison available like there is for CPU's and GPU's. I spent quite some time looking for a new GPU but at least all the numbers could be easily compared. In the case of SSD's, it seems all a bit 'foggy'. This is worsened by the fact, that some SSD models are reviewed almost exclusively for one capacity (most notably the Vertex 3 IOPS 240gb). It doesn't take much 'conspiracy thinking' to imagine why...

Anyway, I'm glad that most of you lean towards the M4, in terms of price and performance. I'm considering to buy it in the coming days, at least before I change my mind again hehe.

There are too many variables. The synthetic benchmarks at best are only a rough approximation of real world use.

Manufacturers have a tendency to select and "adjust" benchmark settings so that the results present a component as favorably as possible.

^ Gene O. - Thank's for the link
"For any owners of this drive, Corsair is doing a recall on their Force 3 120GB CSSD-F120GB3-BK drive. They have asked owners to stop using them even if they are not showing any symptoms: "

I had heard rumors of this, but not seen it in print.
The link points to firmware and Hardware. The firmware issue is not limited to Corsair, but plagues most of the SF2xxx controller series. Predominantly on the new SB platforms. This is supposedly being worked - The real question is (1) WHEN and (2) what other problems that are NOT readily apparent exist.

At Least Corsair has followed Intel's lead and Recalled/stop shipping. OCZ needs to follow that lead instead of burying their head in the sand.

Look at the HIGH percentage of low egg scores on the SSD's using the SF2xxx controller. I know some are User caused. These drives should place a comment (IN BOLD - And in plain sight) that these drives do NOT work in all new systems - ie Buyer beware.

Bottom line, until this controller issue is put to bed, sacrifices some performance for reliability!!! Not a Intel Lover, But.....

Haha, very interesting indeed. And how foreseeing was my thread title
Anyway, I understand that this mainly affects Corsair and OCZ?

^ Could be outdated. The date of the review was yesterday vs Mar 2011 for your link.

Thanks, well I think I'll be using the page file on the HDD, mainly because ~4GB (which I'm using now) can be quite substantial on 100GB (minus Windows) of space. I also think I'll be keeping the download temp/cache files on the HDD.

As for the speeds, yes I realize I'll be far below the maximum possible read/write speeds. However, take a look at the image and you can see what I'm used to now...

http://bit.ly/jvvpDV

KeyMs92 - There is no such thing as SATA III (6Gb/s) and SATA II (3Gb/s) cables. The International official specifications are identical. No difference between them. Zip! Zero! Zilch! It was done that way on purpose. manufacturers were complaining about always having to change things. If a company is claiming their cable is a SATA III (6Gb/s) cable, then it is an advertising gimmick.

Quality is a different issue. There may be low quality cables of questionable performance and value. In other cases quality assurance may not be up to par. Sometimes a physical dimension might be off.

OK - What I meant was if the quality is not good and the result is poor performance, then the cable or any other product for that matter is not a good value for the money spent.

You are correct. It is not necessary to purchase high priced cables. There are less expensive cables whose quality and performance is just as good. Those are the ones that usually provide the best bang for the buck.

A few years ago the research laboratory at CNet.com tested HDMI cables and wound up recommending monoprice.com. The laboratory and the technicians now use monoprice exclusively. So do I. Highly recommended.

Here is a link to the original article that put me on to monoprice:

http://reviews.cnet.com/hdmi-guide/?tag=mncol;txt

Monoprice offers a lot more than HDMI cables. Here is a link to their SATA cables:

http://www.monoprice.com/products/ [...] A+3+cables

Great!

Can you show a screenshot of AS SSD Benchmark (no need to run test... just screen). I would like to see what controller you are running on. Your #'s should be closer (I would think). I'm not saying you have an issue... just looking to improve

Yes, I'm indeed running sata 2 But I'm happy the hear that my speeds are good for sata 2.

On a more serious note, just a few hours back I experienced a BSOD whilst installing a driver. I'd the feeling this might be quite a serious issue so I looked into the disk management. As it turned out, my old drive had the system partition (so containing the boot files). Now, those two issues might not be in any way related but especially the latter issue is not something I like.

I looked around and some people noted that only the drive designated for the OS should be plugged in whilst installing Windows. Others commented that conflicts can still occur when other drives are added later on because they can still contain boot files. I also looked the bios and found some settings related to RAID, different drives and the boot settings. But I don't know if any of those settings is relevant.

I'm very confused about this. In the past I've had dual boot setups very often but multiple drives is clearly something different. I hope you can help me out.

EDIT: Ok, I'm, still not sure about the specifics but I just turned all the switches in appropriate direction. I disabled my old HD, made in inactive and 'removed' it from the boot sequence. I'm now installing Windows again and it looks like it's creating the boot files on the SSD this time. I hope that I can safely format it afterwards.

EDIT2: Alright it worked! It wasn't difficult at all, it's just that you get confused when reading too many forums. It also turns out that the BSOD was related to this (for some complicated reason). Anyway, off to do the fun part: installing stuff and enjoying the speeds! I'll probably post a few benchmarks here in the coming days.

I see. BTW, have you updated your firmware to 002 yet? In the guide it says your SSD should be plugged in port 0-3. Mine is in port 4 fortunately. But I'm wondering... would that really matter?