Corsair Force Series F180 180GB SSD
Jan 27th, 2011 | By SimonThere’s not too much to cover when it comes to installing the F180. If you have a laptop or netbook you will need to find the appropriate guide on how to remove your existing hard drive. I should warn you now that with some netbooks you end up voiding your warranty on your netbook to get to the hard drive. With a PC, installation depends on whether your case has a 2.5″ mounting bracket it. If it does, then you just need to screw the drive into place and plug in the SATA data and power cable. If you have an older case doesn’t have a 2.5″ mount you’ll be thankful Corsair has included the 3.5″ bracket. The F180 is secured to the bracket from the bottom. The bracket is then mounted like any other 3.5″ drive.
The SATA data and power cable can then be plugged into the drive.
Once you boot your PC you’ll want to make sure the drive has been recognized and start your operating system installation. To test the Corsair F180, I installed Windows 7 x64 and will benchmark it using ATTO, Crystal Disk Mark, PC Mark Vantage HDD Benchmark Suite only, Iometer, and Sisoft Sandra File System Benchmark. Each benchmark will be executed at minimum of three times and the average will be reported. Here is my test configuration:
- Control
- CPU Intel i5 760 @ 2.89 Ghz
- Motherboard: Asus P7P55D-E Pro
- Memory:
- GPU: Sapphire ATI HD4850x2
- PSU: Cooler Master Real Power Pro 850W
- Case:
- Cooling: Arctic Cooling Freezer 13
- O/S: Windows 7 x64
- Hard Drives
- Corsair Force Series F180
- 60GB OCZ Agility 2
ATTO – Write
ATTO – Read
Crystal Disk Mark – Write
Crystal Disk Mark – Read
PC Mark Vantage – HDD Suite
Sisoft Sandra – File System
IOMeter – Sequential Read
IOMeter – Sequential Write
IOMeter – Random Read
IOMeter – Random Write
HD Tune
The overall performance is very good with the Corsair F180. We easily hit the 285MB/s read and 275MB/s write speed in ATTO as Corsair had advertised. As we work through Crystal Disk Mark, we see that the F180 almost doubles the rates of the OCZ Agility 2 in writing. The sacrifice is that the read speed is slower. The same trend is observed in both Sisoft Sandra and IOMeter.