We have recently heard that new Corsair solid-state drives are coming to authorized distributors and retailers worldwide later this month, these are all part of the new Force GT series and as the flame red color suggests they are faster than your averages SSDs, in fact they are capable of 85K random write IOPS
In terms of storage capacities and prices we can confirm that the 60GB model has a suggested retail price of $149, whilst the 120GB model will cost roughly $279, there has also been talk of a 240GB model, however at the time of this post we cannot be sure as to whether or not this will be released, which obviously means we have no idea of pricing either.
All of the SSDs in this series boast write speeds of up to 525MB/s and read speeds of up to 555MB/s, these speeds are possible thanks to the use of ONFI synchronous flash memory, this is said to shine when transferring non-compressible data, which suggests that it should be very good when it comes to moving large video and music files. These SSDs also feature the new SandForce SF-2280 SSD processor and connect to SATA ports at 6Gb/s (SATA 3), these technologies come to together to ensure that boot times, application load times and system response times are far superior to any SATA 2 solid-state drives.
If you do not have a SATA 3 controller don’t worry as all Force Series GT models are backwards compatible with SATA 2 standard, however you must remember that this will have a detrimental effect on performance, therefore if you want the best from your SSD ensure that you are using a motherboard with SATA 3 support. Also if you plan on fitting one of these new SSDs inside your PC you will be glad to hear that they come with a 3.5-inch adapter, as you would expect Force GT SSDs will fit inside any laptop which has a 2.5-inch SATA hard drive bay.
Corsair suggest the Force GT solid-state drives are ideal for high-performance systems, we think that the 60GB drive would be a great primary hard drive for fast performance when used in conjunction with a larger SATA hard disk drive for storage, if you are considering purchasing one of these SSDs you should check out the full release over at Engadget.
Have you switched from HDD to a SSD? If so, what improvements did you notice right away?
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