Upgrading the TG Lab: Corsair's Force Solid-State Drives

[Rob Williams]

On occasion, we post a news feature called "In the TG Lab", and in it, we give a quick preview of a product that we're soon to publish an in-depth look on. There's also been a couple of times when we've posted these features talking about products that we were adopting into our test suites, but going forward, we're instead going to split that off into another feature, appropriately called "Upgrading the TG Lab".

Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Doomsday]

Very Naice!!

They should hit the GPU market next, lol!

 

[Optix]

Aww, hell. I'll have to move to phase change cooling then since Rob will have the same level of storage tech that I do.

 

[DarkStarr]

Well now, I essentially have one of these Its only a 60gb Microcenter "rebranded" ADATA but its flashed with the Corsair Force bios since it has the SF-1200 chip.

 

[Optix]

Does your drive have the updated firmware, DarkStarr? If so, you should be hitting the same speeds as the Corsair drives and my Mushkin but chances are, you paid less for it.

The big selling point on the Mushkin drive was the 50k IOPS compared to 30k without the new firmware.

 

[DarkStarr]

Yep, I put the new firmware on it just the other day.

 

[Optix]

Gah! I wish I had a Microcenter around here, especially when the Z68 boards drops due to disc caching. I'll need to find the cheapest SSD I can find.

 

[DarkStarr]

I could pick you up one and ship it to yah if you would like just paypal the money + shipping but its pretty light and as SSD not much packaging is needed either.

 

[Optix]

Mighty tempting. What do those drives run? It wouldn't be until later assuming I decide to go Z68 and not P67.

 

[DarkStarr]

They were just a touch over $100, mine was $108.65 after tax. They are currently at $99.99 for the only MC branded one, its labeled 64gb (usable 60gb).

 

[Optix]

Rob and I were talking in chat last night and I think I may go for one of these to work in conjunction with a mechanical HDD.

http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820139428

It should be more than enough for gaming since that's all I plan on using disk caching for.

 

[DarkStarr]

Nice but I dunno that its worth the $65 for 16gb lol cant even hold windows (well maybe only just)

 

[Optix]

I'm sure I can find it for cheaper. I just used Newegg because I knew it would be listed for me to link to.

 

[Rob Williams]

I have thumb drives larger than 16GB! I am not sure that'd be worth even considering to be honest. I just installed Windows 7 fresh the other day, and my C:\Windows folder is 16.7GB. Perhaps that's larger than usual for some reason, but that SSD would leave literally no breathing room at all.

 

[Optix]

That's why it wouldn't be used for the OS - just disk caching to improve performance in games. My OS drive is and as of now, always will be a SSD at least 60GB.

Now that I think about it, disk caching requires at least 18GB+ of free space on a SSD so this drive is out. I'd likely step up to a 30GB for this unless I could find a bangin' deal on a 60GB.

 

[Rob Williams]

That's why it wouldn't be used for the OS - just disk caching to improve performance in games. My OS drive is and as of now, always will be a SSD at least 60GB.

Doh, I glossed over that :-/