Upgrading the TG Lab: Corsair’s Force Solid-State Drives

On occasion, we post a news feature called “In the TG Lab”, and in it, we give a quick preview of a product that we’re soon to publish an in-depth look on. There’s also been a couple of times when we’ve posted these features talking about products that we were adopting into our test suites, but going forward, we’re instead going to split that off into another feature, appropriately called “Upgrading the TG Lab”.

At the beginning of the year, I decided to move forward on upgrading our motherboard and CPU test suites, but thanks to the whole Intel Sandy Bridge chipset issue, I decided to sit on it a bit longer. Now that B3 boards are shipping, we decided to begin the hardware upgrade process, and of most importance was our storage drives.

For most of this content we’ve written over the past two or so years, we’ve used Intel’s 80GB G1 and G2 SSDs, but as SSDs have improved, and our need for a bit more storage has become apparent, it was time to take a look around and see about giving our test rigs a much-needed boost.

To that, we turned to Corsair. Our friends there were more than happy to send along a couple of SSDs for the purpose, and upon discovering that I still didn’t have an SSD in my own personal rig, they also tossed in another so that I can finally stop living in the dark ages and experience some true speed.

We’ll likely be delegating the F120 and one of the F160 Force drives, which feature the super-fast SandForce SF-1200 controllers, for multiple purposes. But mostly, the 160GB will be set for most of its use in our upcoming CPU suite iteration, while the 120GB will be used for all of our motherboard testing.

For my personal rig, I’ll be partitioning the drive into two sections, where Linux will be on the first, and Windows on the second. I’m sure that once installed, I’ll be a little overwhelmed by the performance boost and will be sure to follow-up with my real-world thoughts.

Huge kudos to Corsair for all of its support. Our CPU test machine in particular will be equipped with a Corsair chassis, PSU, CPU cooler, RAM and now, an SSD. You could say that the company truly does enjoy seeing its products in our machines! If you want to learn even more about the Force drives, I’d recommend checking out Robert’s in-depth look at the F90, or check out the official site below.