Introduction

Corsair was the first to send us a retail SF-1200 controlled SSD, the Corsair F100 100GB. That was quite an exciting moment for us since we had already tested two early pre-production SF-1500 enterprise drives. We knew that SandForce's consumer controller was very similar to the enterprise controller and that for desktop tasks performance would be about the same. Little did we know that SandForce had improved the firmware from January to March so much that the performance of the final retail products improved considerably. The F100 and other SandForce SF-1200 controlled drives showed us that the only thing holding back performance was the SATA II interface.

The Corsair Force F100 review was published three months to the day of me writing this review of the F120. So much has changed in that short amount of time. We were the first to bring you a detailed review of new extended capacity SandForce SF-1200 controller. In that article we determined that the new 7% over provisioned drives were able to retain the same high level of performance while giving users more usable capacity. Going from 100 to 120GB might seem like a small step on paper, but when in real world use 20GB makes a real difference.

The other nice thing that has occurred since the Corsair F100 review has been massive reductions in price. The F100 at one time was selling for around 430 USD but the new F120 can be found at Newegg today for less than 350 USD. With the economists starting to talk about a double dip, this is one dip that users can actually look forward to.

Let's take a look at the Corsair F120's specifications and see what all the new extended Force has to offer.