Corsair announce new Force 3 Solid State Drives

Today Corsair announced its new line of solid state drives. The “Force 3” drives are the first mainstream line to take advantage of the SATA III 6GB/S to give unprecedented read and write speeds. The new drives will utilize the SandForce SF-2281 SSD Processor which is expected to deliver speeds of 550mb/s on the read and 520mb/s on the write. In addition to this they are also expected to provide 85000K IOPS proving very large performance increases over older SATA II drives.

Even though these new models are designed to take full advantage of the SATA III 6GB/s ports, should you have old SATA II 3GB/s connectors they are still backward compatible. As usual the SSD drives will be 2.5″ and come shipped with 3.5″ adaptors to provide convenient use with desktop systems.

Pricing is expected at the following levels:
60GB $139 ~ £90
120GB $219 ~ £140
240GB $499 ~ £310

Expect other manufacturers to follow suit as the mainstream use of this new technology spreads.