Corsair F120 SSD - post your speeds

Thought I'd start a thread completely dedicated to the Corsair F120 SSD drive as I can't find much in this forum related to this particular model (seems that the forum's flooded with Vertex 2-ers).

So, I got my F120 last weekend, installed it in my machine (see sig for spec), and noticed that I've only managed to get 7.8 in the WEI for my HD. I also average about 80MB/s when I copy, for example, a 4GB DVD file on my C: drive (which is surprisingly low??). Bit disappointed, but not sure if this is normal for 'day-to-day use'.

What type of speeds is everyone else getting with this drive? And are there any tricks / techniques to get the most out of the drive in terms of performance. I haven't really optimised anything, just plugged it in, made sure it was running on AHCI mode, and installed a fresh copy of W7 on it. I also noticed that when I installed W7, the system created this 100MB reserve on my SSD, is this normal? (see screenshot below)



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The hidden 100MB partition is normal. No need to do anything with it.

 

Please run Crystal Disk Mark 3.0 with 0 fill data, 3x 50 MB so we can see if your drive functions correctly.

 

Hi Phil. Thanks so much for the quick reply, appreciate it.

Just ran CDM 3.0.1, had my opera browser + msn open but not much else is open so hopefully its an accurate reading of my SSD's performance:


What do you think, what does this tell you. Cheers!

Edit: Just done a second run with my browser closed:


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Is it also true that benchmarking an SSD is bad for the life of the SSD??

 

Ah thats good to know , thanks! Just wondered, what is it actually for? A friend of mine said that his one didn't have this 100mb partition. I ran something in the cmd window (i think it was something to check if the drive was correctly aligned), and my friend said mine was odd, because the drive didnt start immediately (due to the 100mb reserve); any thoughts on this? thanks

 

Looks like you have a normal performing Sandforce SSD. Writes should be a bit higher but it's not something you'll notice in real life. 4K performance is lower because of the Intel chipset. If you want you could disable intelppm in your registry to optically improve your 4k reads and writes in benchmarks. In real life it will only improve installation performance.

Benchmarking writes data, and flash cells have a limited number of writes, that's why I recommend 3x 50 MB.

PS. always make sure you have Intel RST driver, latest version installed.

 

Awesome stuff! Given that its working fine, I'm happy to leave it as it is. I think my laptop runs hot and that probably slows it down in some way/shape/form. Not sure why; crappy Dell, can't ever get it spot on I guess!

 

The 100 MB portion at the front of your drive is system recovery stuff and I think maybe the encryption stuff that Windows installs as a "backup". You only get it if you install Windows on a fresh (non-partitioned) drive. If you've already formatted and partitioned your drive, Windows respects the existing partitions and doesn't add the 100 MB partition at the beginning.