discussion Corsair Force 90GB SSD Single & RAID Review

[AkG]

Vista Start Up / Adobe CS5 Load Time

Vista Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. While all the other tests were run with a Windows 7 operating system, this particular test uses another older test bed's “day to day” OS (copied over to our new testbed) which has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Force_90/boot.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
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Yes we all know Vista is, was and forever will be a dog. It really is “XP Turtle Edition” or “Windows M.E. 2.0”, but that is besides the point. The fact of the matter is it really does do a great job of showing how good this moderate sized drive is at loading even a dog slow (and extremely “used”) OS. The Force 90 is faster at boot times than the smaller drives, and while it is not quiet as fast as the larger Force 120 it does post some down right respectable numbers. This goes double for the RAID numbers it posted as it churned through this test in record time!

Adobe CS5 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, and while the latest version is actually pretty decent, when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Force_90/adobe.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
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[AkG]

Real World Data Transfers

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 10.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containing 400 subfolders with a total 12,000 files varying in length from 200mb to 100kb (10.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, using MS RichCopy (set to 1 file depth) and logging the performance of the drive. Here is what we found.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Force_90/copy_lg.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Force_90/copy_sm.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
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So far it seems the real world results line up pretty well with the synthetic results. To be blunt this Force 90 drive will give you most of the power and performance of its bigger brother -the Force 120GB- but that power is going to be limited in some key areas. However, in many file transfer cases it will very rarely be the SSD which becomes the bottleneck.

 

[AkG]

Conclusion

Conclusion

With the SSD market expanding so quickly, it has extremely hard for manufacturers to stay ahead of the technology curve. Upcoming SF2000-based SATA 3 drives and Corsair’s Marvell P2U1200 totting Performance 3 series will likely drive the upper echelon market to new heights yet again and the costs associated with buying a leading edge drive will continue to increase. However, the Force series and its ilk will continue to offer first time SSD buyers an excellent price / performance alternative to the best of the best.

For all intents and purposes the performance of the Force 90GB is exactly what we would expect from modern, high end SSD. It’s synthetic benchmark numbers were impressive to say the least but they did seem to indicate that Corsair opted to go without SandForce’s more expensive “full speed” option. We just have to remember that synthetic numbers really don’t mean all that much but the real world testing we conducted did show some noticeable differences between the F90 and its competitors. Drives carrying SandForce’s premium firmware did perform substantially better in nearly every test. (Editor's note for clarification: While drives carrying Sandforce's "premium" firmware did show performance differences over the Force 90, there are other factors to take into consideration as well. This is the first 90GB SandForce drive we have tested which means any deviation from past results could be due to capacity, controller load balancing and numerous other factors. Corsair tells us the F90 does indeed have the “full speed” firmware and since we cannot independently confirm this, we can just indicate where the performance results seem to point.)

While the $190 price of this drive may be seem as a major benefit, it also acts as a double edged sword. On one hand, a high performance SSD sporting a reasonable amount of storage space is now sitting at a sub-$200 price point. However, this is a cut-throat market and Corsair’s competition has the Force 90GB beat clean with drives sporting better performance and similar prices. OCZ’s Vertex 2 120GB can be found for less than $225 while the 100GB version comes in at $200. Even Corsair’s own Force 120GB can be bought for around $230.

When combining two of these drives, overall performance increases significantly and some truly awe-inspiring numbers can be attained. However, this proposition doesn’t come cheap since two F90 drives will put you back nearly $400.

Corsair’s Force 90GB is a good SSD from a number of different aspects. Performance, storage capacity, broad availability and Corsair’s excellence in customer support combine together to make what should be a highly enticing product for people looking to get their feet wet in the SSD pool. However, its current retail price makes the F90 a hard sell in a highly competitive market. Corsair could choose to roll out an unlocked firmware when a new revision is released but until that time, there are better alternatives out there for nearly the same price as the F90.


Pros:

- Good size for first time buyers
- Decent real world performance in most situations
- Corsair’s reputation and warranty backstopping this drive is very reassuring


Cons:

- Too expensive when compared to the competition
- Can’t compete on a level footing against some similarly-priced drives
- Thinner metal chassis compared to earlier Force models

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