 Today I have a very cool and interesting new product to unbox. This is a Corsair Solid State Drive, and as you can see from the sticker applied at the bottom of the box, it is a 4 Series 60G drive. So the 4 Series, very creatively named because of the San Force controller that it uses, is a state of the art SSD that has the fastest reads and writes available on the market in many common applications. Now there's one that is a little bit faster in some situations. It's a SATA 3 SSD from Crucial, but there have been some firmware issues with that and it's sort of debatable whether it's worth the risk or not. San Force on the other hand has proven to be a very stable platform, and so that's what we are going to be having a look at today. So Corsair includes a couple of different accessories with their 4 Series SSD. First of all they have a 2.5 to 3.5 inch drive adapter. So this is just, it's a pretty bog standard one. You can see how it works here. So you've got four screws to attach the drive to the adapter here. You can see it mounts off to the side a little bit. And then you've got four screws to mount the drive adapter, which you can, it looks like you can only mount it from the side. So if you have a hard drive mounting system that requires the holes on the bottom, you won't be able to use this adapter. You might have to get a different one. But yeah, you've got all of the screws included that you need. Anyway, what's so special about the 4 Series drives is that along with the new San Force controller comes a couple of cool features. First thing to notice is that this is a 60 gig drive. The original San Force drives were in 50, 100, and 200 gigabyte capacities. But what has been done with the latest firmwares is it's been improved to 60, 120, and 240 gig capacities because they're using slightly less spare area. Now, spare area gives you a little bit of extra space to tweak performance, but some companies were able to find ways to tweak the performance of the drive, free up some spare area, and still get the same performance out of a 60 as you could out of a 50 and out of a 120 as you could out of a 100 gig drive. So, of course, there has kind of a neat finish to their drives. You can see the side is sort of just a plain, a plain sort of matte finish, whereas the top has actually got like a nice brushed finish to it. So, if you're mounting this drive somewhere where you're going to be able to see it, you'll definitely appreciate the little touches like that that make it look nicer. Now, a cool thing about the 4 Series drives again is the sequential reads and sequential writes as well as the random read and random write performance. This 4 Series drive can actually write at up to 275 megabytes per second sequentially. It can read it up to 285 megabytes per second sequentially. Now, it used to be when we only had drives like the OCC Vertex, this is a Gen 1 Vertex, that used MLC Flash. Now, MLC Flash means that it can actually store two bits of data where SLC, single SLC Flash can store only one bit. So, MLC is obviously much cheaper because you get double the capacity that you would have out of each flash cell that you have to manufacture. So, MLC Flash inherently cannot write as fast as SLC Flash. The reason I keep holding this drive up is this is an Intel X25E 32 gig drive. This uses SLC Flash and what happens is SLC can be written to much, much faster. But the 4 Series controller actually uses special algorithms to compress the data as you're writing it to allow it to write 275 megs. But actually, it's only writing less data to the drive because it's compressing it and then decompressing it whenever you're reading it on the fly. So, it does make for a more complicated, more expensive controller, but you save money because instead of spending four times the amount on SLC Flash, or well, four times by the time it hits a shelf, it only costs double. But rather than spending so much more on the Flash, you're spending more on the controller, which is relatively minor. So, thank you for checking out my unboxing of the Corsair 4 Series F60 SSD. And hopefully you stay tuned. I'm going to be doing something on my NCIX Tech Tips channel with this drive, so don't forget to subscribe, Linus Tech Tips, as well as subscribe to my NCIXCOM channel for all of the latest tech updates.