Seriously, if you're shopping for an SSD and don't know the name
SandForce yet, you're not doing it right. The producer of what looks to be the consensus
fastest controller on the market is spreading its wings today with a new drive announced by
Corsair that offers its SF-1200 chip and capacities of either 100GB or 200GB. The Force follows swiftly in the wake of the
Nova and Reactor series and represents Corsair's new flagship device in this space. It'll offer the generous consumer a sweet 280MBps read and 260MBps write speeds (yes, those are mega
bytes we're talking about), "class-leading random read/write performance," and the requisite
Trim support to ensure it maintains that performance in the long run. A specific price is not yet known, but these are expected out within the next couple of weeks.
posted Mar 4th 2010 6:37AM
Needs more SATA-6
@Dante of the Inferno
Yea.. there is the micron drive that hits 350mb/sec read speed.. not sure about the other metrics.. I bet these drives will be priced closely aswell.
@excelsium
You are talking about the Crucial (Micron) C300. It's bloody expensive
This I would pay for.
Anand made the good point of waiting a little while to see prices and reliability to settle down a bit.
@YpoCaramel Yup...I think most people who aren't hardcore gamers and just want to speed up their computers a bit are just waiting for these puppies to drop to under a hundred bucks for more than 100GB.
@YpoCaramel IMO gamers benefit no more from SSDs than everyone else, just faster game loading times. The program loading and startup time advantages are very real and every can benefit.
I didn't mean 100GB @ $1000 pricepoint. I was thinking just more competitive with current options (before Q4 2010 where apparently Intel will introduce drastic price cuts) - $300-400 for 120GB.
Are these SLC or MLC drives?
@Yankee MLC. Also, RTFA ;)
Once again Engadget editors are woo'd by benchmarks the sandforce controller is designed to do well on. Its easy for the controller to check the nand cell to see if the data has already been written. Benchmarking programs have yet to write dynmamic data. Just wait, and watch the sandfarce, excuse me, sandforce controller fall flat on its face in real world applications.
@billwklein
It may or may not keep consistent numbers for dynmamic data, but I'm going to go ahead and assume moving or copying over a few folders will be moving a bit faster then other SSD drives. Who knows though, i may be wrong, anyone looking to spend the money to find out? One thing I am sure of though is that it will be over priced like all SSD drives... Seriously, stop making them faster and concentrate on bringing the SSD's price lower to the masses....
I'm forced to wonder were the rest of the storage went. I'm sure these will be priced along side 128GB and 256GB drives respectively. Or Corsair is trying to hit a lower price point with a slightly smaller product, still not doing us any favors on the pricing front there though.
@KAL326
I'm betting they actually have 128GB and 256GB capacities, but due to the way the sandforce controller works, it uses the extra space for redundancy and error correction stuff. (More so than other controllers)
Anandtech had a detailed article about it a while back:
http://anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3702&p=1
@jivetrky Thanks for the link, very insightful on how the SF controller works. Interesting 20% spare/reserve space held on the drive. Though this seems the norm for enterprise class ssd, link indicated that they should have some consumer variants with a lower percentage used for spare which should result in 60GB, 120GB, etc drives.
I actually do not care what these cost, as I will not be getting one. But I am excited to see more SSD products hitting the market every day at higher capacity and faster speeds. It is only a matter of time before competition and maturing technology force the prices down to where us mere mortals can justify buying one (or two). In the meantime, regular old hard drive technology is serving me well.
Am I gonna have to start selling my hot bod............to be able to afford this thing??