Packaging

Corsair's drive comes in a fairly compact package, which seems to be of generic nature. A sticker on the bottom right indicates the actual product inside.


You will receive:

• The SSD

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. Unlike many other SSDs, the Corsair Force F40 comes in a rugged metal casing that feels extremely solid and high quality.


Like all other Sandforce drives, the Force F40 uses a SATA II (3 Gb/s) interface which is able to handle speeds of up to 300 MB/s. It is compatible with any other SATA standard.


Corsair is using 12 flash chips and the Sandforce flash controller, which is located in the middle of the PCB. An additional DRAM cache chip, like other SSDs use for additional caching, is not available. Four spots for flash chips were left empty, so Corsair could achieve their size target of ~40 GB (12x 4 GB = 48 GB). This results in a 7-channel design whereas the full Sandforce design uses eight channels. As a result, available bandwidth is slightly reduced.


As controller the well-known Sandforce SF-1222 is used.


The flash chips are made by Intel and have a capacity of 4 GB each, they are made on Intel's 34 nm process node.