Corsair Force Series SDDs Moving From 34nm to 25nm MLC NAND Flash
Corsair today announced its plans for the upcoming transition from 34 nanometer to 25 nanometer flash chips used on its solid-state drives. Flash memory manufacturers are transitioning to using 25nm process for fabrication, allowing them to boost capacity and reduce costs, which in turn will allow SSD suppliers to pass those savings to the consumer. The downside is that SSDs built using 25nm flash ICs may require more over-provisioning (a technique used to ensure reliability) which lowers the capacity of the SSD and may also see a reduction in performance. Corsair is bringing out a new naming scheme for the 25nm drives, which is great in our opinion as it lets people know exactly what they are buying. Force Series 115GB and 80GB 25nm drives will be available by the end of February from Corsairs worldwide network of resellers and distributors. The F115-A has a Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) of $215 and the F80-A has an MSRP of $169 in the U.S. For comparison the current Force Series F120 has an MSRP of $249 and the F80 has an MSRP of $199.
In the Corsair Labs, using the ATTO synthetic benchmark, only a small reduction in performance (roughly 3-4%) was seen when testing Force Series SSDs built with 25nm flash. Real-world tests, such as copying groups of files or measuring Windows boot times, support the ATTO results and show little to no performance loss. However, the over-provisioning needed means that in some cases the capacity of the drives will be reduced. So that our customers are perfectly clear about what they are getting, we will be changing the model numbers on all 25nm based drives and transitioning the drive capacities we offer where necessary. For example, a drive that would have been sold as 120GB when built with 34nm flash will be launched as a 115GB version, said Jared Peck, Global Product Marketing Manager for SSDs at Corsair, All Force Series drives built with 25nm flash will also have a -A suffix on the part and/or model number, making it easy to determine exactly what youre getting.
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