Conclusion

Announcement: Despite the circumstance that the rating of a product is based on as many objective facts as possible there are factors which can have an influence on a rating after publication. Every autor may perceive data differently over time whereas one possible reason for example is a deeper background knowledge or understanding of certain processes. Certain unforseen market conditions as well as changes have the potential to render a descision made at a certain point in time obsolete.

The Force 3 from Corsair is the slowest SandForce SF-2281 based SSD we've come across so far. The drive uses asynchronous NAND which is compliant with the ONFi-1.0 standard. Furhtermore the Micron NAND Corsair selcted for the Force 3 is cheap but as we saw from the test this come at the cost of performance. If we look at the performance this drive doesn't hit the numbers and figures Corsair promises. Furhtermore it is quite a bit behind the competition.
Unfortunately there are even complaints in our forums that this drive isn't very reliable. It seem to happen quite often that the system dies with a bluescreen. If users wanted to boot afterwards the BIOS wont recognize the drive until you decide to perform a cold boot. There are even users who lost their drive completely after a bluescreen. In this case the only thing you can do is to RMA your drive. Fortunately Corsair shows goodwill in these cases and gladly replaces the drive.

The delivery is quite poor either. Users who want to migrate their operating system from a HDD to their new SSD might be very happy about a Disk Imaging Software like for example one can get it from Acronis or Symantec.

Last but not least there is the price which is the one single point this drive can really convince. If you're looking for the cheapest SF-2281 drive with asynchronous NAND Flash then you'll be perfectly right with the Force 3. For as less as CHF 150.- (est. EUR 125.-) you get a brand new drive. This is about CHF 10.- (est. EUR 8.-) to CHF 15.- (est. EUR 13.-) cheaper than the competition.

We give this drive insufficient two out of five stars.