It wasn't all that long ago when we saw IDE crushed by the influx of SATA-II and since Solid State Drives (SSDs) have arrived, a similar takeover is now underway with SSDs dropping in price and bigger capacities on the horizon. The SATA-II drive is beginning to look rather weak.

SSDs are smaller, more portable, dramatically faster, and have a significantly longer life-span. At the bottom end of the capacity range there are 40GB, 60GB and 80GB. These sized drives are dropping in price making them ideal bait for a bootable operating system drive.

Today is the first time we take a look at SSDs and so the journey begins. With having no previous drives tested it the SSD in question today will be compared to a standard SATA-II drive. This should make for an interesting article as we will see the real speed benefits of moving to SSD, showing just how much efficiency is to be had from the new successor.

Corsair have been at the very pinnacle of storage and memory based products since 1994. They have a multitude of SSDs currently available on the market and were amongst the first to launch this innovative product, today we will be taking a look the Force series and in particular the F40. The 40GB version. This is the smallest of all SSDs within the Force range, and is ideal for being used as a bootable OS drive.