Conclusion

Corsair offers a pretty straightforward range of solid state drives. Their Force series of solid state drives are targeted at the mainstream performance market. That means users who want a fast solid state drive with TRIM support at a reasonably affordable price.

The Corsair F90, which is the focus of this review, offers 90 GB of fast Intel NAND flash memory, and a SandForce 1200 controller that is capable of up to 50,000 transactions per second (4 KB random write aligned transactions). Of course, that was its rated performance.

When we tested the Corsair F90, we never came close to 50,000 transactions per second. The best the F90 did in the 4 KB random write test was 9,445 IOPS when IO Meter was set to use 32 outstanding I/Os. With that said, it was a ton better than what the 160 GB Intel X25-M G2 (34 nm) was capable of.

Generally, the Intel X25-M G2 was much faster at reads, but the Corsair F90 did a lot better at writes. That translated into truly excellent scores in the real-world WinBench 99 tests, where the Corsair F90 trumped even fast solid state drives like the 120 GB OCZ Vertex 2 (E).

Overall, we are quite happy with the performance of the Corsair F90 90 GB solid state drive. Its excellent write performance makes it a far better drive than the Intel X25-M G2. It is also much cheaper than the Intel X25-M G2 - at the time of this review's release (Feb. 4, 2011), the Corsair F90 costs US$ 2.13 per GB while the Intel X25-M G2 costs US$ 3.12 per GB.

Although it is somewhat saddled by a relatively small storage capacity and rather poor read performance, the Corsair F90 would make a great (and affordable) replacement for your notebook's hard disk drive, or as a boot drive for your desktop PC.

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