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I just wanted to provide a quick update on the Corsair Force Series 3 120GB review that was posted a few weeks back. I ended up coming home from an east coast trip and had an application that threw multiple errors. Upon trying to relaunch the application, I was met with another error that the path was not found. I had read many a forum post about some of the SandForce drives dropping so this was not totally unexpected. Hopefully LSI can provide some help with their testing.

The fix is fairly simple:

1. Shut down the PC and leave it off for a few seconds. Some say pulling the power supply also helps. I should note that a simple reboot still left the drive inaccessible.
2. Once the PC is booted, and you can see the drive, get the firmware update from the Corsair forums.
3. Extract and run the updater. You should see the drive marked (note this is the only SF-2xxx series drive installed on this particular PC.
4. Select the drive and click “Update firmware”
5. Pick one of the .vic files and click OK.
   

   Corsair Force 3 120GB - Update Firmware Select Firmware

6. Click proceed after you are sure you have backed everything up.
   

   Corsair Force 3 120GB - Update Firmware Warning

The Corsair Force Series 3 120GB drive combines a Sandforce 2200 series controller alongside asynchronous NAND memory to provide a lot of performance at a relatively low cost. It should be noted that the earlier drives, specifically those starting with serial numbers before 1123 were recalled on June 7, 2011 due to firmware issues. Unfortunately, SSDs from all manufacturers, including Intel, have still seen some firmware issues and there may still be some lingering issues with the Force 3 series. Frankly though, every manufacturer has seen issues so the takeaway here is, buy a SSD, and have network backup. Luckily readers of this site tend to have lots of network attached storage for backups so recovering from a SSD is a trivial affair. After reviewing the Corsair Performance 3 (P3-128) 128GB drive based on the Marvell controller, I decided to purchase a Force 3 120GB drive to compare. Continue Reading

After reviewing the Hitachi 5K3000 2TB SilentSpin drive earlier this year, questions have steadily trickled in around the 3TB version. One thing that was consistent in comments was a perception that the Hitachi 5K3000 3TB drive runs slower than the 2TB version. Today we look at the 3TB model’s benchmarks to see what kind of performance the drive offers. Continue Reading

Many users have been finding themselves with brand new Sandy Bridge motherboards and the hard drive industry’s now affordable 3TB drives only to see that the new drive only has 746GB available in even 64-bit Windows. I receive questions about why this happens on Hitachi, Western Digital, Seagate, and Samsung drives on a regular basis so I think this is a fairly common issue. I myself fell victim to not following best-practice and seeing this issue manifest itself recently when I was benchmarking a new drive. As a result, I decided to make a guide so other users can easily fix the problem. Continue Reading

This weekend I got a call from a local business that produces highlight reels from video game footage. Admittedly, I am not a big gamer (my PS3 was purchased at launch and has played games for less than four hours over the years), but I did think that this would be an interesting opportunity to do some troubleshooting over a rainy weekend. Continue Reading

Corsair’s Performance 3 series is a newer SATA III 6.0gbps drive that offers quite a bit of performance utilizing a Marvell controller. Marvell has been making a splash lately on SSD controllers. The Micron C300 held the performance crown for almost a year as its competitors were capped by SATA II bandwidth constraints. Today we will look at the Corsair Performance 3 Series P3-128 drive that utilizes custom tweaked firmware and does achieve speeds well above what SATA II can offer. Note this is the same physical controller used in the Intel 510 SSD released this week. Continue Reading

Hitachi’s 7K2000 drives were a favorite among users with large small business and home storage systems because the drives worked well with many RAID cards. A few drawbacks of those drives were that they were not the fastest 7,200rpm drives around, they were not the coolest running, nor the quietest. With its 3TB lineup, Hitachi introduced not just the 7,200rpm successor to the 7K2000 series, the 7K3000 series, but also a “green” drive alternative, the 5K3000 series. Retail availability is still not the best as the drives are just becoming available at major retailers and etailers. Continue Reading

Today I am taking a look at the G.Skill Phoenix Pro 60GB Sandforce SFF-1222 based SSD. Two things that should be clarified at the outset are that the G.Skill Phoenix Pro 60GB and the ADATA S599 64GB both have the same formatted capacity (55.8GBs) and that there is no perceivable real-world difference between the drives. The difference between the 60GB and 64GB drives is due to marketing semantics rather than physical differences. Second, I have used both drives quite a bit over the past few weeks, and I use Indilinx and Intel X25-M G2 drives regularly as well both in servers and on all notebooks and desktops. Frankly, each controller exhibits different characteristics that one can see easily using a suite of benchmarking software. Those benchmark differences are not translating to real-world performance advantages for one controller over another at this point. Continue Reading

I have been doing a bit of testing recently with the LSI SAS 2008 based controllers such as the 9211-8i in RAID 0 with various SSDs. Recently I took eight 64GB ADATA S599 Sandforce based SSDs and placed them in RAID 0 on the LSI 9211-8i. I was expecting maximum transfer rates in excess of 2GB/s in ATTO. What I saw instead was a performance anomaly. Continue Reading

One recent contact form question was regarding the alleged 660MB/s limitation on the Intel ICH10R chipset (also known as the 82801JR I/O controller), especially in conjunction with X58 based chipsets which currently represent the big iron of Intel’s lineup until the LGA 2011 parts come out in Q3 or Q4 2011. When the ICH10R was released in 2008, there was little need for more than 660MB/s as SSDs were still not hitting the SATA II bandwidth caps. When platter drives peaked around 120MB/s having a six port (one likely occupied by an optical drive) that could put out 660MB/s was fine. In 2010, 660MB/s is barely more than two ~$100 SSDs can put out. With all of that being said, I decided to throw the stable of ADATA S599 64GB drives at the ICH10R and see what they could do. Continue Reading