Corsair Force LX 256GB Solid State Drive Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The Corsair Force LX 256GB is a real budget drive, being one of the cheapest we have tested. We have seen in the benchmark tests on the previous pages that this doesn’t hold the drive back on its performance. At the time of writing the drive can be had for $149.99 in the U.S. at newegg and in the U.K it can be had for as little as £89.99 on Amazon. Overclockers UK doesn’t have the 256GB model in, but does offer the smaller 128GB and bigger 512GB models.

While there aren’t any extras in the package itself to add to the value, you can download the Corsair SSD Toolbox from their website. This tool will as mentioned give you access to many useful features that some more costly drives don’t offer directly.

Overview

When I get a new Corsair product into my hands I expect one thing – for it to work great aand perform at least as advertised. This is simply due to the fact that it has always been for me that way, and this time wasn’t any different. The Corsair Force LX 256GB Solid State Drive performed as advertised through out any test I gave it.

During the benchmarks, we have seen some very good read figures in all of our tests. The drive performs well above average in almost any test I ran on it, and at times also above advertised, showing figures close to 560MB/s. The write speeds are on a mediocre level, around the 300MB/s mark. We were however never promised better speeds, so we can’t fault the drive in any way for these numbers. The conditioning of the drive did show some minor degradations, but they were really minor, and considering the amount of work the drive had to perform while on our test bench, it’s barely marginal.

Further value is added to the drive by the Corsair SSD Toolbox that not only allows you to monitor your SSD’s health state and flash the firmware, but also features a drive-cloning ability and secure erase function. This is a great bonus to have and that is free for any one using a Corsair Solid State Drive.

Corsair offers a 3-year warranty on the drive and it is rated for 1.5 million hours meantime before failure (MTBF). There is no 3½ inch adapter bracket included, but most modern cases are all ready for 2½ inch drives and laptop users can just slide this 7 mm slim drive right into their system.

Pros:

• Top read speeds
• Good software
• One of the cheapest drives
• Aluminium casing
• Barely effected by conditioning

Cons:

• Mediocre write speeds

Neutral:

• No adapter bracket

“The Corsair Force LX 256GB is a true budget drive coming without all the unnecessary accessories, but still performs great and as advertised. The downloadable toolbox adds further value. The Corsair Force LX 256GB is a great, cheap upgrade for any system, whether it be a laptop or stationary system.”

Thanks to Corsair for providing this review sample.