Corsair Unveils Force Series 3 Solid State Drives

[hsakarp_kahtap]

Corsair has just announced its latest line of solid state drives, the Force Series 3. Using the latest SandForce SF-2281 controller, the Force Series 3 claims up to 550MB/s read and 520MB/s write speeds. The drives support SATA 3 (6Gbps) and are backward compatible with SATA 2.
According to Corsair, Force Series 3 drives will be priced close to previous generation drives. Corsair's suggested retail prices for the drives are as follows:

• 60GB - US$139
• 120GB - US$219
• 240GB - US$499

Hopefully prices will decrease further as more manufacturers bring new generation Sandforce drives onto the market. Prices of previous generation SSDs have dropped in tandem, which might be of interest to bargain hunters.
See the full press release below:

Corsair announces Force Series 3 Solid State Drives
New family offers SATA 3 performance for near SATA 2 pricing
FREMONT, California May 16th, 2011 Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced the Force Series3 family of solid-state drives.
The newly announced Force Series 3 models take advantage of the new SATA 6.0 Gb/s (SATA 3) interface to deliver impressive speed at an attractive price. The Force Series 3 features the highest performance version of the latest-generation SandForce SF-2281 SSD Processor with out-of-box read and write speeds of up to 550 MB/s and 520 MB/s respectively, and an impressive 85000K IOPS for measurably faster system response, boot times and application load times than SATA 2 solid-state drives. All Force Series 3 models are also backward compatible with SATA 2, and include an easy-to-use 3.5 adapter to allow owners of both desktop and notebook PCs to enjoy the cool, quiet operation and enhanced system performance made possible by replacing their traditional mechanical hard drive with an SSD.
With the rapid market adoption of SATA 3, there's strong demand for affordably priced SSDs that can take advantage of the enhanced performance it provides said Thi La, Vice President of Memory Products at Corsair.Our new Force Series 3 SSDs provide the performance that enthusiasts demand, at price points approaching the current generation of SATA 2 SSDs
We are pleased to have our SandForce SF-2281 driving the leading-edge performance of the Force Series 3 family, said Jeremy Werner, Director of Marketing at SandForce. Corsair, and its newest Force Series 3 drives, is poised to ride the wave of SATA 3 adoption by offering compelling pricing and enthusiast-level performance.
Force Series 3 solid state drives will be available worldwide this month from Corsair's network of authorized retailers at a suggested retail price of $139 USD for the 60GB model, $219 USD for the 120GB model and $499 USD for the 240GB model. Note that stated capacities are unformatted and actual capacities will vary depending on the formatting and operating system used. For more information on Force Series 3 solid state drives, please visit the Corsair web site.

Source

[JayCub]

Thank you for the additional information Prakash, i have been watching the changes and the prices, it's important to watch out for the version your buying as prices are close for SATA II and III, ASUS offer a nice PCI card with two USB 3.0 ports and two internal 6 Gbps ports, as quite a few motherboards are shipping with two onboard 6 Gbps ports, the lack of available hardware to testers restrict bench mark results but it does show how fast the holes in hardware are been plugged by companies.

[Bearcat]

$139 for the 60 Gb model isn't totally out of line for a SSD that uses the new SATA III interface. I wouldn't really need anything larger than that, as I would only be running the OS on it. Read and write speeds of up to 550 Mb/s and 520 Mb/s should be blazing fast I would think!