Corsair, a worldwide designer and supplier of high-performance components to the PC gaming hardware market, today announced the Force Series 3 family of solid-state drives. The newly announced Force Series 3 models take advantage of the new SATA 6.0 Gb/s (SATA 3) interface to deliver impressive speed at an attractive price. The Force Series 3 features the highest performance version of the latest-generation SandForce SF-2281 SSD Processor with out-of-box read and write speeds of up to 550 MB/s and 520 MB/s respectively, and an impressive 85000K IOPS for measurably faster system response, boot times and application load times than SATA 2 solid-state drives.

All Force Series 3 models are also backward compatible with SATA 2, and include an easy-to-use 3.5" adapter to allow owners of both desktop and notebook PCs to enjoy the cool, quiet operation and enhanced system performance made possible by replacing their traditional mechanical hard drive with an SSD."With the rapid market adoption of SATA 3, there's strong demand for affordably priced SSDs that can take advantage of the enhanced performance it provides," said Thi La, Vice President of Memory Products at Corsair. "Our new Force Series 3 SSDs provide the performance that enthusiasts demand, at price points approaching the current generation of SATA 2 SSDs."

"We are pleased to have our SandForce SF-2281 driving the leading-edge performance of the Force Series 3 family," said Jeremy Werner, Director of Marketing at SandForce. " Corsair, and its newest Force Series 3 drives, is poised to ride the wave of SATA 3 adoption by offering compelling pricing and enthusiast-level performance."

Force Series 3 solid state drives will be available worldwide this month from Corsair's network of authorized retailers at a suggested retail price of $139 USD for the 60GB model, $219 USD for the 120GB model and $499 USD for the 240GB model. Note that stated capacities are unformatted and actual capacities will vary depending on the formatting and operating system used.