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

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
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".

corsair_ssd_force_032111_thumb.jpg

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

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
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

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

Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
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.
 
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Optix

Basket Chassis
Staff member
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

Tech Monkey
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

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

DarkStarr

Tech Monkey
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

Basket Chassis
Staff member
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

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
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

Basket Chassis
Staff member
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.
 
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