Pictures and Breakdown

The Force LX uses a fairly standard black aluminum case with rounded corners. This isn’t the same casing that Corsair uses on the rest of their drives, but by going with a standard stamped case like a lot of other manufactures they could keep costs down to keep the Force LX as their price point drive. They did stick with their normal theme on the sticker on the top though. Each of their SSD Series has the same theme with the name vertical down the side of the sticker and then the color coded LX. They left a large white area close to the middle for the SSD capacity, in this case we are testing a 256GB model. Then down along the bottom of the sticker you have the serial number and barcode.

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Around back, we don’t have too much going on. You have mounting points on the bottom as well as the sides of the drives to fit any standard 2.5-inch mount. If you are looking to break into the Force LX like I am going to do. You need to get at the four tiny screws that are flush mounted on the sides of the drive. There are two stickers that cover two of the four screws to let them know you have been digging in the drive though so only do that if you don’t plan on RMAing in the future.

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So when I opened up the casing I was surprised to only find a PCB that takes up half of the case. Normally an SSD PCB fills then entire 2.5 inch drive. With NAND increasing in capacity Corsair was able to fit more into a smaller space for the Force LX. A smaller PCB lowers costs and in the case of the Force LX I don’t think they ever had any intentions on making a huge capacity drive in a pricepoint drive so there wasn’t a need to save space for additional NAND to go beyond 512GB. So now that we are into the drive we do still have to pull out three more screws to get to the back. But here on this side we can see four out of the eight 32 gig MLC NAND chips. To be specific you are getting Micron L85 20nm die NAND.

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When we flip the drive over we can see the other four Micron L85 20nm die. In addition to that closer to the SATA port we have the SMI SM2246EN Slow Motion controller. For buffering it also has a 128MB Nanya DDR3-1600 DRAM chip next to the controller.

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garfi3ld replied the topic: #36293 20 Feb 2015 18:13
Happy Friday everyone. Today I take a look at a 256 gig SSD that you can find for around $125. At that pricepoint is this a great SSD, we will find out!

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