Corsair Force F40 40GB SSD Review

The Corsair F40 SSD drives were tested using a fresh install of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.  The drives were tested as standalone drives.  We also tested the drives in a RAID 0 configuration for an upcoming article.  We compared the Corsair F40 to an Intel X25-V 40GB drive, which uses an older Intel G2 controller. The Asus P6X58D-E motherboard uses an Intel ICH10R southbridge which supports TRIM.

	Component Brand/Model Live Pricing Processor (CPU) Intel i7-950 Click Here Motherboard Asus P6X58D-E Click Here Memory 12GB Corsair Dominator-GT DDR3-2000 Click Here Video Card eVGA nVidia 460 GTX Video Card Click Here Boot Drive 2x Corsair F40 SSDs (Raid 0) Click Here Case Lian Li V-1020B Black Aluminum Case Click Here Power Supply NZXT HALE90 750W Click Here Operating System Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Click Here

ATTO measures how read and write transfer rates differ at different volume lengths.  The test was run with the default settings of 0.5 kilobytes to 1024 kilobytes.  The test shows that the F40 handles small file sizes very well, and has amazing read and write speeds for a single drive.  The F40 topped out at  281MB/second read speed and 228MB/second write speed.

ATTO provides more favorable results than other benchmarks, but still shows the power of the drive

We’ve used HD Tach for years to measure  random access and read/write performance of hard disk drives.  HD Tach is a low-level hardware disk benchmark that bypasses low-level software layers to measure actual performance as closely as possible.

A little dip at the beginning, but consistent throughput over the entire virtual length of the drive

As was expected, HD Tach showed a consistent performance line over the entire length of the drive, and scored an impressive 251 Megabytes per second with an amazing 0.1ms random access rate.

We recently started using AIDA64’s Disk Benchmark, which is the successor to Everest.  The Disk Benchmarks are rather comprehensive, as they can test Linear Read, Random Read, and Average Read Access performance of a storage device.  The F40 had a consistent Linear Read of 267.1 MB/s, a random read average of 250 MB/s, and a very low average read access of less than 0.1 millisecond.

AIDA64’s verdict on the F40 is about the same as the other benchies

Of course, who could forget SiSoft Sandra?  They recently released their Sandra 2011 suite, which produces some of the prettiest graphs in our benchmark testing.  Again, the Corsair F40 shows a consistent read rate of 259 Megabytes per second, while the write Drive score was lower than the other benchmarks at 209 Megabytes per second.

SiSoft Sandra 2011 Read and Write speeds

So the drive is fast.  On the next page we go over some points to consider when selecting a smaller SSD like the F40.