Corsair Force Series 3 120GB Solid-State Drive

The SSD market has finally gotten traction and that can be seen by the number of solid state drives being sold these days. However, there's still something lacking. Most of the drives being sold aren't performance-oriented drives. They are quicker than traditional drives, but not by much. The need for a larger, as well as blazing SSD is there and Corsair hopes to serve this need with their new Force Series 3 SSD drive. We’re testing the 120GB version, although Corsair also sells 60GB and 240GB versions.

Worth the price

Design and Features
There's little to differentiate between SSDs in terms of design. The Corsair xxxxxxz is as compact as any other SSD out there. It's got a matte-finish exterior and it conforms to the 2.5-inch form factor. Corsair bundles a tray mount, so you can easily set up this drive on a desktop chassis on a 3.5-inch slot. In terms of accessories, there is nothing else bundled in the package. The drive is black, sturdy and looks attractive with a fancy Corsair branding label at the top. Like most SSDs in the market today, this too is a SATA3 (6Gbps) capable drive. Corsair claims that the drive has a power consumption of just 2W under load and 0.5W in idle condition.

Sata 3 and Power Ports

Performance
Like with all storage drives, synthetic benchmarks don’t really tell you the entire picture. The scores are often far-fetched from real world tests. We used SiSoft Sandra, as well as HD Tach to get an idea of the theoretical speeds. Read speeds according to SiSoft were 417.83 MB/s, while write speeds were 338.49. Both these figures are extremely impressive. When we used HD Tach to measure read speeds, it too recorded impressive read speeds of 372.6 MB/s. This is way higher than what most hard drives are capable of. CrystalDiskMark with 4K sized data blocks did take a battering, but with 512K and larger chunks, speeds were always above the 100MB/s mark for both, writing and reading.

CrystalMark Test

To find out what actual write speeds would be like, we tried copying a 4GB file and then a 4GB folder on the SSD. Sequential data transferred at average speed of 157.5, which is very impressive. Write speeds of assorted data using the real world test were equally impressive. The 4GB data set transferred with a speed of 146.8MB/s, very close to the read speeds. Clearly, the solid state drive is one of the faster drives we’ve tested in recent times and the scores were almost identical to those of the Plextor PX-256M2S 256GB SSD, we reviewed a few weeks back.

SiSoft Test

Verdict
So, should buy this drive? We think so. Priced at Rs. 10,499, the Corsair Force 3 120GB strikes a very good balance between speed and capacity. It’s roughly the same performance as the last Plextor drive we reviewed. Although, the capacity of this Corsair SSD is half that of the Plextor, this drive is priced even lower than it. Sure, with this kind of capacity, you won’t be able to dump all your media onto it, but the most played games and the most used applications should fit into the drive along with your operating system.