Corsair 60 GB Force Series 3 SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive - CSSD-F60GB3A-BK

Firstly, I want to start by saying that I KNOW what I'm doing with technology as I've worked with it for well over 20 years now, so what I'm about to post doesn't need trolling from 16 year olds who think they know better. Secondly, this review is mostly for those who either haven't worked with SSD's before or are having trouble getting this drive to play nice on their SATA controllers.The thing to understand about SSD's is that while they are VERY fast, they are also still in their infant stages. With this drive in particular, this is what you need to do to make sure that it performs the way it should.1. Make sure that the cable you use to connect to your motherboard is at LEAST a SATA-2 cable. A vanila motherboard SATA cable is more than likely going to be SATA-1 and this drive will complain about it with failures and whatnot.2. Make sure your motherboard has the SATA port you connect this drive to configured as AHCI in the BIOS and NOT RAID or Sata. The primary reason for this is that most motherboard built in controllers are not really well built to start with and were NOT built with SSD in mind.3. On some boards (Gigabyte, MSI & a few others), you can NOT use RAID and SATA combos on the same controller with this drive. As an example, the GPA880FX-UD3H board sports two different controllers... 6xSATA-3 and 2xSATA-2. You have the option (BIOS updates) to set the 6 way controller to do a mix of RAID and AHCI. This is great for conventional HD's but the Corsair WILL pitch an absolute fit about it. The easy solution for this is to put the SSD on the 2nd controller by itself in AHCI mode while your RAID array sits on the first controller.4. Some FACTS about marketing with SSD's. This drive, like many others is listed as a SATA-3 drive. Sounds impressive and fast, but the sad reality is that NO SSD ON THE MARKET CAN GO 6GB's PER SECOND. It will probably be a little while before the real need for SATA-3 is even realized. So basically, if you have a SATA-2 board, you'll be just fine. I have one myself so I can tell you that it's still super fast on SATA-2 and there would is no real improvement on a SATA-3 system, which I also have.5. If you get an SSD, do NOT go crazy trying to put all of your applications, music, videos, games, etc on this drive. Make this your OS drive and leave it at that plus a few applications (MS Office, WinAMP, etc.) There is an actual reason for this. As SSD's get full with data, they try to spread the date out in a, for laymens sake, shower pattern on the drive itself. Conventional hard drives try to go in a straight line, as much as possible. Without being TOO technical, this is one of the reasons SSD's are much better for short term storage rather than long term archival. The problem comes in when the SSD is near capacity, it'll start to slow down since it has to recall these data block from different places in the storage chips. The general rule is to only use up to around 80-85% of the USEABLE space on the drive. This gives the drive the room it needs to clean itself up and keep your data fetch times very low (5ms or around there).6. If you're going to use this drive for a Windows 7 machine that already has a partition in place, after you've gotten everything moved and working, MAKE SURE TO RUN THE SYSTEM PERFORMANCE TEST WITH WINDOWS AGAIN. This will tell Win7 that it's now using an SSD drive and turn on appropriate services such as TRIM (you WANT this) and turn off others like caching (you don't really need this with an SSD). You will probably also want to turn off the hibernate feature of your computer once you're using this drive as an OS drive. The truth is this drive (once configured correctly) is nearly as fast in startup/shutdown as conventional hibernate and in rare cases, it's actually faster.This is probably the best starter advice I can give to anyone looking to plunge into the SSD pool. If this has helped anyone, I'm glad.

I am not new to SSD technology and have been transitioning to them for a few years now. We started by upgrading most of our field reps laptops. They were extremely pleased. Not only did their laptops boot more quickly, but their runtimes on battery increased dramatically. So much so, that many of them stopped by our department to compliment us on the upgrade decision.Like others have mentioned, going from a 7200rpm platter disk to SSD is by far the single best upgrade you can give to a 1-3 year old notebook or desktop system. You won't need benchmarking software to "see" the difference in performance. You'll notice the first time you start your machine or when you are performing a fresh install of your OS. If you like working in a quiet environment, SSD is the way to go.The Force Series are extremely reliable and come with a great warranty. I have easily deployed over 45 of these drives for business use, and probably 10 more for personal or family. I have not experienced one problem. As a precaution, we have performed firmware upgrades on a few of our oldest drives, but this has not been done because of problems or failure, rather for maintenance when a unit is being re-imaged for use in new hardware. As with all SSD drives the Force series is not competely without faults. In some rare instances, a drive may not resume properly form standby or hibernation in certain hardware configurations. Don't let this deter you from moving to SSD. A firmware update can resolve this problem in 99% of cases. Keep in mind that all manufacturers have had issues during the time SSD has evolved. They keep getting better.I just finished a desktop build with 2x F120's in RAID 0 on an Asus MB, Z68 chipset.Boot time: 26 sec. My MB allows me to supress display of POST messages, so I get a very fast Boot.Improved Effciency: Dramatic performance increase booting, opening large files or loading hi-rez photos, less heat inside my caseResume from standby: about 7 sec (twin view monitors)Resume from hibernation: about 12 sec. With spin up of system fansThis system was built using the model listed F120GB3A-BK w/ v1.3.2 firmware. If you like a product that works as promised, look no futher.

I figured it was about time to review this SSD.I got one at a good price elsewhere (not Amazon), then realised that 90GB wasn't really going to be big enough as a long-term Windows 7 64 system-drive.So decided to live dangerously, and bought a second (at amazon) to run as a 180GB RAID 0.That was in September 2012, and not only did the install go perfectly, I've had not a single glitch of any kind in the subsequent 18+ months of continuous usage, apart from single BSOD which I know for certain was entirely the fault of the application I was running at the timeThankfully, I discovered that my Asus P8Z77-V motherboard uses the first Intel chipset/controller to allow 'TRIM' on SSD's in RAID (I didn't even know what TRIM was when I bought the parts for the build), so the drives are running optimally.Read speeds are typically c. 860 MB/S, IOW pretty-much twice the speed of a single Force 3, but writes are not much faster than a single drive would be.From the Windows logo first appearing after POST, boot takes about 20 secs, shutdown about 5 or 6 secs. The speed at which programs initialise is also, of course, much MUCH quicker than with an HDD. And I have to say, revisiting Half-life 2 has been a real pleasure - the 10 or more second waits which interrupt games while maps load now take 3 or 4.So I can report that the two 90 GB Force 3's I bought have performed flawlessly, and can be recommended.

Bought two Corsair Force 3 60 GB SSD to use as my system disk in RAID 0 and I must say I'm extremely happy with the result. My only regret is that I didn't buy the 240 GB ones (they were way too expensive for me at the time).Obviously using SSDs instead of HDDs works out to be quite a bit more expensive GB for GB, but once you've made the change you'll never want to go back.I suppose the overall performance also depends on your computer configuration. Mine are connected to an Crosshair IV, Phenom II x6, 16 GB DDR3 & 2 x HD 6850 in crossfire.The benchmark results using "CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64" are as follows: Sequential Read : 329.146 MB/s Sequential Write : 133.969 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 314.903 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 126.460 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 21.773 MB/s [ 5315.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 89.382 MB/s [ 21821.8 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 40.348 MB/s [ 9850.6 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 101.001 MB/s [ 24658.4 IOPS] Test : 4000 MB [C: 94.9% (104.3/109.9 GB)] (x1) Date : 2012/08/31 14:36:12 OS : Windows 7 Ultimate Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)When I first made the change, it didn't seem that great a difference (apart from instant on, when you return from sleep). You really notice the difference when you have to use a computer with HDD for a while and then go back to SSDs. Everything is just smoother and quicker. I suppose it's a bit like boosting your bandwidth, you never want to go back to a slower speed. Prices of SSDs have dropped quite a bit, whereas HDDs still remain high after the price hike last year, so it's becoming an ever more attractive option.

I have been using these solid state drives for very long time. It is very stable, fast and cheap. Build quality is not giving the user that solid feeling. Outer case of the drive is thin and you can feel it by touching. Still this thin case doesn't effect the speed and I think it helps the cooling a bit. Also who would touch or squeeze the drive while it is operating? :)I have been used this drive with sata2, sata 3 ports without any problem. Tested operating modes are IDE, AHCI and RAID 0,1,10,5. Drive was working very good.This drive deserves to have 5 stars.

Delivery was fast and on time great ssd drive just plugged it and it was ready to go the only reason i gave 4 star is i wish i got the 256 GB. 90GB is good if just wana load some games on it just set it as a secondary slave drive and all your games will run sweet

What can you say.Does the job for me. Firmware updates are not easy to find and dont seem to be encouraged by Corsair.