Corsair Force LX 512GB

The Corsair Force Series LX is the brand’s latest SSD, and it’s pretty good. Unlike other SSDs which are available in a wide variety of capacities, the LX is available in two capacities: 256GB and 512GB. It uses 20nm Micron MLC NAND flash that’s paired with a controller that we’ve never come across before, the Silicon Motion SM2246EN.

The 512GB LX excelled in our benchmarks, writing large files at a blistering 573.8MB/s and reading them at an equally impressive 480MB/s. We did manage to exceed 600MB/s when writing large files, but we only managed this feat once. We wouldn’t expect such a result from a single non-RAID SATA3 SSD and, as expected, it was sadly a fluke; repeating the test resulted in a fairly consistent speed of around 570MB/s which is nonetheless excellent. Small files were written at 97.1MB/s and read at 82.1MB/s. This isn’t as good, and is in fact a little behind leading SSDs such as the Crucial MX100 (see our review, What’s New 319), which wrote small files at 148.8MB/s and read them at 92.3MB/s.

The LX doesn’t come with any accessories, such as cloning software or a kit for mounting the 2.5in SSD inside a desktop PC’s 3.5in slot, but this isn’t surprising given that Corsair aims its products at gamers and advanced users who are perfectly capable of sourcing these accessories themselves.

The Corsair Force Series LX 512GB is an impressive SSD and is competitively priced at 36p per gigabyte or £185. This is slightly more expensive than the 512GB Crucial MX100 which remains our favourite SSD. Although it’s not quite as fast when it comes to large files, its faster small files performance makes it better overall. Still, the LX is a worthy alternative for general use and for situations where large file performance is imperative, such as a locally attached or network-attached RAID array for storing huge media files.