If you're looking for speedy SSD performance but don't want to mortgage your house, Corsair's low-end SSD fits the bill nicely.
Most buyers looking for a SATA3 SSD would expect the blazing fast performance of drives in the Vertex 3 class, and for good reason. Why else would SSD manufacturers bother putting such a speedy interconnect in place if the rest of the drive can't keep up with it? They'd probably have their expectations reinforced if they saw the mighty SandForce SF-2281 was powering said drive. The Corsair Force Series 3 ticks both of these boxes, but there's a very important feature missing that you'll only discover after a little research.
It turns out that there's two types of the Series 3 - the GT, and the non-GT. The GT is the premium version of the two, while the non-GT offers better bang for buck. There's a good reason for the GT to be much more expensive; it's stocked with synchronous memory, while the non-GT has the much cheaper asynchronous memory. There's a reason why it's cheaper - this memory type has half the theoretical bandwidth of the synchronous type. Unfortunately most buyers wouldn't dig this deep, and would probably assume the non-GT is almost as fast as the GT thanks to the SATA3 interface. They'd be wrong.
It's not half the speed of the synchronmory drives thanks to the intricacies of SSD technology - it's actually worse, offering just 43% of the sequential read speed of the similarly specced Vertex 3. Write speeds are anywhere between 50% and 99% of OCZ's Vertex 3, so you'll definitely notice a performance difference. The question is whether the price difference is big enough to make the performance drop palatable; after all, this drive is still exponentially faster than a mechanical drive, and will put most SATA2 drives to shame.
For around just $200 this drive offers excellent value for money, and is the one of cheapest SSD drives per megabyte you'll find on the street. If you're looking for blazing performance at a price that won't burn a hole in your wallet, look no further than this entry-level offering from Corsair.
Available from Corsair, retailing for $209.APC rating: 8/10 (Highly Recommended)