Corsair Announces Force Series 3 SATA 3.0 Solid-State Drives

If you are salivating over the second generation SandForce-powered SSDs or are simply eager to see more competition in the SSD market, then we have some good news for you. Corsair has today announced its Force Series 3 solid-state drives. As one may expect they utilize the SATA 3.0 “6Gbit/s” interface and are powered by the latest SF-2281 controller that has been shown to deliver eye-popping performance.

Specifically looking at the 120GB Force Series 3 model, Corsair lists a peak of 550MB/s reads and 510MB/s writes for sequential operations. By comparison the original Force series 120GB peaked at 285MB/s reads and 275MB/s writes, showing a not-too-shabby jump in performance. No SSD performance metric would be complete without random writes, and to that end Corsair lists the Force Series 3 with a simply mind-numbing 85,000K IOPS, which happens to be 35,000K IOPS more than the original SandForce SF-1200 equipped Force drives.

Force Series 3 solid-state drives are expected to reach shelves this month and will be priced at $139, $219, and $499 for the 60GB, 120GB, and 240GB models, respectively. These prices compare favorably as they match or even beat current market prices for the older Force series drives, with the sole exception oddly being the largest 240GB model. Corsair will of course offer a standard three year warranty and will include a 2.5″ to 3.5″ single-piece adapter with all of its Force Series 3 drives.

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 Series™ 3 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.