Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark and PCMark 7

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 – Intel P67 Platform

Benchmark Results: In terms of SandForce drives, the incompressible data benchmarks such as this one really starts to show the differences in the drives. In the sequential tests, there’s a large gap between the Force 3 and the Force 3 GT drive in terms of reads (more than double) but the differences in the writes are a little more modest – as are the 4k scores.

PCMark 7 Professional – Intel P67 Platform

We are continuing to use the new PCMark 7 software since they have updated it to version 7 which is specifcially designed for Windows 7. It measures the performance of the latest PC hardware across a variety of common scenarios. PCMark Vantage 7 supports both system level and component level benchmarking and comprises several different test suites but for the purposes of this review, we employed the secondary storage suite. The nice thing about it is that you can submit your scores online and compare against others.

Benchmark Results: The GT also flexes its muscles here over the non-GT Force 3 in the overall score and app startup test. The other scores were relatively close and the overall score wasn’t too far back off of the leaders.