Gadgetory

today I have a very cool and interesting new product to unbox this is a corsair solid-state drive and as you can see from the sticker applied at the bottom of the box it is a 4 series 60 gig drive so the 4 series very creatively named because of the sandforce controller that it uses is a state-of-the-art SSD that has the fastest reads and writes available on the market in many common application than now there's one that is a little bit faster in some situations it's a say 23 SSD from crucial but there have been some firmware issues with that and it's sort of debatable whether it's worth the risk or not sound force on the other hand has proven to be a very stable platform and so that's what we are going to be having a look at today so of course they're includes a couple of different accessories with their 4 series SSD first of all they have a two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half inch drive adapter so this is just it's a pretty pretty bog standard one can see how it works here so you've got four screws to attach the drive to the adapter here you can see it mounts off to the side a little bit and then you've got four screws to mount the drive adapter which you can that looks like you can only mount it buy it from the side so if you have a hard drive mounting system that requires the holes on the bottom you won't be able to use this adapter you might have to get a different one but yeah you've got the all of the screws included that you need anyway what's so special about the 4 Series drives is that along with the new sound force controller comes a couple of cool features first thing to notice is that this is a 60 gig drive the original sound force drives were in 50 100 and 200 gigabyte capacities but what has been done with the latest firmware is it's been improved to 60 120 and 240 gig capacities because they're using slightly less spare area now spare area gives you a little bit of extra space to tweak performance but some companies were able to find ways to tweak the performance of the drive free up some spare area and still get the same performance out of a 60 as you could out of a 50 and out of a 120 as you cut out of 8 100 gig drive so of course there has kind of a neat finish to their drives you can see this is sort of just a plane a plane sort of matte finish whereas the top is actually got like a nice brushed finish to it so if you're mounting this drive somewhere where you're going to be able to see it you'll definitely appreciate the little touches like that that make it look nicer now cool thing about the 4 Series drives again is the sequential reads and sequential writes as well as the random read and random write performance now this 4 series drive can actually write at up to 275 megabytes per second sequentially it can read it up to two hundred eighty five megabytes per second sequentially now used to be when we only have drives like the ocz vertex this is a gen one vertex but used mlc flash now mlc flash means that it can actually store two bits of data where slc single slc flash can store only one bit so mlc is obviously much cheaper because you get double the capacity that you would have out of each flash cell that you have to manufacture so mlc flash inherently cannot write as fast as slc flash the reason I keep holding this drive up is this as an intel x25 ii 32 gig drive this uses slc flash and what happens is slc can be written to much much faster but the 4 series controller actually uses special algorithms to compress the data as you're writing it to allow it to write 285 get our rather 275 Meg's but actually it's only writing less data to the dried because it's compressing it and then decompressing it whenever you're reading it on the fly so it does make for a more complicated more expensive controller but you save money because instead of spending four times the amount on slc flash or and while four times by the time it hits a shelf that only costs double but rather than spending so much more on the flash you're spending more on the controller which is relatively minor so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Corsair 4 series f60 SSD and hopefully you stay tuned I'm going to be doing something on my NCIX tech tips channel with this drive so don't forget to subscribe Linus tech tips as well as subscribe to my NCIX comm channel for all of the latest tech updates