Corsair introduces 90GB SSDs priced at $159 and $199

Jos

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Corsair has announced new additions to its Force Series 3 and Force Series GT range of solid-state drives. Touting these as the world's first 90GB SATA 6Gb/s devices, the Force Series GT offers read speeds of 555MB/s and write speeds of 505MB/s, while the Force Series 3 is just slightly behind with read and write speeds of 550MB/s and 500MB/s.

Both drives use MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips, though the Force Series 3 is said to use asynchronous flash memory while the Force Series GT uses ONFI synchronous flash memory and is supposedly "particularly adept at reading and writing non-compressible data, such as video and music files."

A SandForce SF-2200 controller powers the new drives and the two of them offer a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rating of 2 million hours.

The Force Series 3 drive is available now for $159, or about $1.77 per GB, and the Force Series GT for $199. They come bundled with 3.5-inch adapters for use in desktops and are backed by a three-year warranty from Corsair.

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Still too expensive. I just wish they could come up with a price solution. Only then SSDs will become mainstream.
 
I hear allot of people having problems with SSD's, in a few months they fail...
Failure rate is way to high... imho ...
Neighbor kid works at Best-buy, they are so overwhelmed with SSD failures in computers
Still Way to expensive...
$1.80 a gig, wow, to expensive..
Ram is at its all time low in price.... So why are these SSD's still so expensive...?????????
Can not justify the price of a SSD, when I can get a WD raptor, 10,000 rpm, for 300 gig, for $125.00..

Ya think :)
 
Two raptors in raid can't match the performance of a sata 6gb ssd.
I'm using a 60gb for OS and it's perfect for it,I now just use 4 5900rpm drives for storage.
I do agree that it is expensive though.I had a hard time deciding between the ssd or a seagate momentus XT.
 
3dcgmodeler said:
I hear allot of people having problems with SSD's, in a few months they fail...
Failure rate is way to high... imho ...
Neighbor kid works at Best-buy, they are so overwhelmed with SSD failures in computers
Still Way to expensive...
$1.80 a gig, wow, to expensive..
Ram is at its all time low in price.... So why are these SSD's still so expensive...?????????
Can not justify the price of a SSD, when I can get a WD raptor, 10,000 rpm, for 300 gig, for $125.00..

Ya think :)

Raptor is nothing compared to even an old generation SSD, no where near. As for RAM, people think nothing of paying £10+ per GB for RAM yet think SSD's cost to much, I don't get it.
SSD as system drive, HDD as storage, one of the best upgrades you can do imo.
 
3dcgmodeler,

Do you know what you are talking about?

1) A Raptor does NOTHING to enhance the user experience since it doesn't fix the terrible access time of a mechanical drive. The whole point of an SSD is amazingly fast access time in all situations, and the ability to do more than 1 thing at a time (like have 100 tabs open in Firefox, while you are running an Anti-Virus scan and transferring data/music across folders). Try doing that on your 300 GB mechanical drive....

2) Most people buy a 60/90/120 GB SSD and a 2-3TB drive for storage. Those larger drives have superior platter density and will transfer data just as fast if not faster than your Raptor.

In other words, the only drive that actually makes no sense is the Raptor.

Keep in mind, an SSD's response is impossible to quantify for me on the internet. It's so fast that even when I pair it with a E6600 2.4ghz, it smokes my Core i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz + 1 TB mechanical drive for opening files/documents, responsiveness.

If you ask me, $150 for such an amazing performance increase in responsiveness is a bargain since I am benefiting from it every single day I use it. But you can continue to use your 10,000 RPM loud mechanical drives for another 5 years while the rest of us get the performance of the 21st century today.

Oh ya, and it probably pays attention to actually understand how expensive the parts that go into the SSD are today:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4604/the-sandforce-roundup-corsair-patriot-ocz-owc-memoright-ssds-compared
 
Guest said:
3dcgmodeler,

Do you know what you are talking about?

1) A Raptor does NOTHING to enhance the user experience since it doesn't fix the terrible access time of a mechanical drive. The whole point of an SSD is amazingly fast access time in all situations, and the ability to do more than 1 thing at a time (like have 100 tabs open in Firefox, while you are running an Anti-Virus scan and transferring data/music across folders). Try doing that on your 300 GB mechanical drive....

2) Most people buy a 60/90/120 GB SSD and a 2-3TB drive for storage. Those larger drives have superior platter density and will transfer data just as fast if not faster than your Raptor.

In other words, the only drive that actually makes no sense is the Raptor.

Keep in mind, an SSD's response is impossible to quantify for me on the internet. It's so fast that even when I pair it with a E6600 2.4ghz, it smokes my Core i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz + 1 TB mechanical drive for opening files/documents, responsiveness.

If you ask me, $150 for such an amazing performance increase in responsiveness is a bargain since I am benefiting from it every single day I use it. But you can continue to use your 10,000 RPM loud mechanical drives for another 5 years while the rest of us get the performance of the 21st century today.

Oh ya, and it probably pays attention to actually understand how expensive the parts that go into the SSD are today:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4604/...triot-ocz-owc-memoright-ssds-compared[/quote]

Well said, I agree with just about everything. Still, SSD's are a bit on the expensive side of things.
 
I have my system drive my SSD and data on spinner driver now. I have to say SSD is still expensive for data storage, but it's okay to be used as system drive since all you need is a 64GB or 90GB SSD.

The fact is if even the previous gen of SSD is an order of magnitude faster than any mechanical drive. In fact, it's so fast that we cannot tell the difference between, say, 500MB/s vs 230MB/s most of the time. With that in mind, I was able to find some $1/GB (with rebate) and had the best upgrade to my system that money can buy.

BTW, I stay away from SandForce based SSD until they are more stable. There are tons of complaints on the internet (compared to non-SandForce SSD). I also have a SandForce SSD that failed after 7 months. That's just my experience. Others may disagree.
 
I am building soon and and would like to put in an ssd. I have looked at reviews and feed back and hear of these problems. I am confused why is there problems? They say 2 million hrs failure runtime, so why only 3 year warranties? Please shed some light.
 
Kralnor said:
Guest said:
3dcgmodeler,

Do you know what you are talking about?

1) A Raptor does NOTHING to enhance the user experience since it doesn't fix the terrible access time of a mechanical drive. The whole point of an SSD is amazingly fast access time in all situations, and the ability to do more than 1 thing at a time (like have 100 tabs open in Firefox, while you are running an Anti-Virus scan and transferring data/music across folders). Try doing that on your 300 GB mechanical drive....

2) Most people buy a 60/90/120 GB SSD and a 2-3TB drive for storage. Those larger drives have superior platter density and will transfer data just as fast if not faster than your Raptor.

In other words, the only drive that actually makes no sense is the Raptor.

Keep in mind, an SSD's response is impossible to quantify for me on the internet. It's so fast that even when I pair it with a E6600 2.4ghz, it smokes my Core i5 2500k @ 4.5ghz + 1 TB mechanical drive for opening files/documents, responsiveness.

If you ask me, $150 for such an amazing performance increase in responsiveness is a bargain since I am benefiting from it every single day I use it. But you can continue to use your 10,000 RPM loud mechanical drives for another 5 years while the rest of us get the performance of the 21st century today.

Oh ya, and it probably pays attention to actually understand how expensive the parts that go into the SSD are today:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4604/...triot-ocz-owc-memoright-ssds-compared[/quote]

Well said, I agree with just about everything. Still, SSD's are a bit on the expensive side of things.

Indeed. Truthfully, it doesn't matter how you put it, the extra performance, to most people, doesn't justify the price. Until it does--assuming, of course, the price lowers to mainstream expectations--then it will remain a niche component.
 
One major thing to consider is whether or not you put your computer to sleep vs shut it off.

If you shut off your computer all the time, an SSD drive will greatly improve your boot times. But if you put your computer in sleep mode, you don't notice that much of a difference.

$160 is not a bad price I suppose, if for no other reason to just experiment with them and see how they work for you. If you think its really awesome, then you might put one in every build. If they're just ok, then stick with mechanical for now.
 
While I am willing to admit that the high price is a factor to consider when shopping for a ssd my biggest concern is the fact that I keep seeing info on the net that claims ssd is much more prone to failure than a conventional disk drive. I have 9 disk drives in operation at the moment ranging from about 1 to 5 years old. Several of them are in 24/7 operation. All but one is WD. Until ssd technology can routinely last 5 years plus with out failure I will keep my money in my pocket.
 
Guest said:
Until ssd technology can routinely last 5 years plus with out failure I will keep my money in my pocket.
No harddrive can guarantee that either.
So you need backups anyway, therefore I don't see the logic of this thinking?
 
I really don't know what the mean time between failure is for hard drives. I suspect it has as much to do with the model as well as the manufacturer. I can only report the fact that I have a 5 year old desk top drive as my oldest working drive.
Also, ssd manufactures are sure keeping failure rates quite, which in my opinion is not something that inspires confidence.
Perhaps what I should say is that it's quite obvious that ssd tech is not nearly as mature as conventional hard drives. That coupled with the price premium is sufficient to deter me from switching to a ssd for use as my C drive. As the technology matures and failure rates and prices go down at some point I will jump on the ssd band wagon.
I realize that no storage technology is failure proof but I have been burned before by being an early adopter. This time I believe I will wait.
Follow the logic?
 
Guest said:
Also, ssd manufactures are sure keeping failure rates quite, which in my opinion is not something that inspires confidence.
I do follow your logic in the skepticism for SSD's
However I am lost in your confidence for mechanical harddrives.
Let me throw the question back at you, when was the last time a machanical harddrive manufacturer released their failure rates?
Perhaps Samsung with their epic 7200.11 firmware problems, just to name one :p

Intel offers a 5 year warranty on all of their sold 320 series SSD's (it was originally 3 years) that sure inspires confidence in me...
You know what Seagate did a while ago? Their reduced the warranty on some of their harddrives from 5 years to 3 years!
http://www.techpowerup.com/78659/Se...5_to_3_Years_on_Some_Desktop_Hard_Drives.html
 
You know having never been able to play with a ssd's. I really haven't had much of a desire to do so. People kind of make me raise a eye browse concerning the capabilities of processors. amd 1.9 dual core socket AM2, paired with 4 gig corsair 800 mhz memory, ati radeon 4850, and a few those mechanical hard drives ran three monitors with at least 30 tabs open all the time, 5 to 10 im windows, so many projects up the butt. I hardly see how mechanical hard drives are so bad. It seems more of the end users fault than anything.

Main topic: SSD's are over all still to expensive IMO. mechanical hard drives work fine when the end user keeps their computer maintained accordingly : D.
 
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts I don't know the failure rate of hard drives. But if ssd were better on that account you can bet it would be widely announced by the ssd manufactures. "Our new ssd have half the failure rate of old cruddy disk drives." Since they are not saying that I have to suspect that the failure rates of ssd are worse than hard drives. Also, data loss not with standing it is a lot less demoralizing to have a $80 1g hard drive go down than a $500 256meg ssd drive head South.
Perhaps I am just more comfortable with hard drives because I have used them for years. It does seem that ssd having no moving parts is a factor in their favor and given time for the technology to mature they will probably surpass hard drives in every way save for price. And if they do become the norm in a few more years perhaps they will compete on price as well.
One other thing that I neglected to mention that figures in my decision to stick with old hard drives is the fact that I'm an American living in a third world country that charges a premium for computer gear. Ssd are especially dear. Also all businesses here are like the Frengi. "Once you have their money you never give it back." Getting money back here is like trying to take a salmon from a grizzly bear. It's just not going to happen. If I was still in the states Newegg would give me a month and the manufacturer would give me a few years. Here warranty service is a nightmare. All these things conspire to keep me with the technology I know.
But you are right. Failure rates for all this stuff is a big unknown. But I'm not running a business so data loss while frustrating does not impact my bottom line. If you happen to be an IT guy and pull failed drives out of servers all day long I can see how you might look at hard drives with a more jaundiced eye than myself.
 
Sorry about the mistakes in my last post. I meant to say a $80 1tb hard drive and a 256g ssd. I must be living in the past. A $80 1g hard drive. lol
 
Failure rates for all this stuff is a big unknown. But I'm not running a business so data loss while frustrating does not impact my bottom line. If you happen to be an IT guy and pull failed drives out of servers all day long I can see how you might look at hard drives with a more jaundiced eye than myself.

A SandForce SF-2200 controller powers the new drives and the two of them offer a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rating of 2 million hours.

Yup, it seems like they just pull longevity numbers out of their a**es.
 
It will take 228.31 years (assuming a 24 hours usage cycle) to fail unless you are one unlucky person and it decide to die on you at a younger age :p
 
I'm currently looking to upgrade the storage of my Windows 7 gaming PC. Looking at a Corsair Force 3 120 GB SSD vs. a WD Caviar Black 2TB HDD. The SSD cost 53% more than the HDD but offers only 6% of its capacity. On the other hand, SSD offers speed and other benefits that mechanical drives cannot offer. This is really confusing.
 
Guest said:
As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts I don't know the failure rate of hard drives. But if ssd were better on that account you can bet it would be widely announced by the ssd manufactures. "Our new ssd have half the failure rate of old cruddy disk drives." Since they are not saying that I have to suspect that the failure rates of ssd are worse than hard drives.
Hardware.fr has a long running article where they show reliability of the systems components
The Intel X25-M series of SSD's has a failure rate (actually it is RMA numbers so not necessarilly all of them are failures) of 0.6%
This is better than all mechanical harddrives...
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/810-6/disques-durs-ssd.html

Actually I found a more recent article and now it's down to 0.3%....
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/831-7/ssd.html
 
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