SandForce TRIM Issue & Corsair Force Series GS (240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on November 22, 2012 1:00 PM ESTInside The Corsair Force GS
Corsair's Force GS uses a similar red plastic chassis as the Force GT.
Included in the retail bundle are two sets of mounting screws and a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter.
The actual PCB is a bit different from what we normally find inside 2.5" SSDs. Its length is only about four fifths of the backplane and it's held in tact by three screws (two in the corners, one in the middle) instead of four. I'm guessing the smaller PCB is slightly cheaper than a regular size 2.5" PCB would have been, hence Corsair opted for one. I don't really see any other explanation because the chassis is still normal size and weight benefit is marginal.
As for the components, there are eight SanDisk's 24nm Toggle-Mode MLC NAND packages on this side of the PCB. These are 16GB packages, meaning that each package consists of two 8GB dies.
Remove the backplane and flip the PCB around and we find another eight NAND packages and SandForce's SF-2281 controller.
Corsair isn't using thermal pads, which isn't all that suprising. Typically thermal pads are only found in high-end SSDs while lower-end models come without in order to offer more competitive pricing.
Test System
| CPU |
Intel Core i5-2500K running at 3.3GHz (Turbo and EIST enabled) |
| Motherboard |
AsRock Z68 Pro3 |
| Chipset |
Intel Z68 |
| Chipset Drivers |
Intel 9.1.1.1015 + Intel RST 10.2 |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsX DDR3-1600 2 x 4GB (9-9-9-24) |
| Video Card |
XFX AMD Radeon HD 6850 XXX (800MHz core clock; 4.2GHz GDDR5 effective) |
| Video Drivers | AMD Catalyst 10.1 |
| Desktop Resolution | 1920 x 1080 |
| OS | Windows 7 x64 |
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JellyRoll - Saturday, November 24, 2012 - link
Entertaining that you would link to thessdreview, which is pretty much unanimously known as the home of misinformation. Here is a link to the actual slide deck from that presentation, which does not ever mention deduplication.http://www.flashmemorysummit.com/English/Collatera...
CeriseCogburn - Saturday, December 29, 2012 - link
LOL - good job, I will continue to read and see if all the "smart" people have finally shut the H up.I was hoping one would come by, apologize, and thank you.
Of course I know better.
*Happy the consensus is NOT the final word.*
dishayu - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Get Kristian on to the next episode of the podcast and make him talk!!popej - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
What exactly does it mean: "I TRIM'ed the drive after our 20 minute torture"?Shouldn't TRIM function be executed by OS all the time during torture test?
Kristian Vättö - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Most of our tests are run without a partition, meaning that the OS has no access to the drive. After the torture, I created a partition which formats the drive and then deleted it. Formatting the drive is the same as TRIMing all user-accessible LBAs since it basically tells the controller to get rid of all data in the drive.popej - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Does it mean, that there was no TRIM command executed at all?Not when torturing drive, because it wasn't TRIM supported partition. Not when you "TRIM'ed" drive, because it was a format.
While I agree that you can notice some weird effects, why do you describe them as TRIM problems? Sorry, but I don't know how your test could be relevant to standard use of SDD, when TRIM is active all the time.
Kristian Vättö - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Formatting is the same as issuing a TRIM command to the whole drive. If I disable TRIM and format the drive, its performance won't restore since the drive still thinks the data is in use and hence you'll have to do read-modify-write when writing to the drive.They are problems in the sense that the performance should fully restore after formatting. If it doesn't, then TRIM does not function properly. Using an extreme scenario like we do it the best for checking if there is a problem; how that affects real world usage is another question. With light usage there shouldn't be a problem but you may notice the degradation in performance if your usage is write intensive.
popej - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Basing on you test I would say, that format is not enough to restore drive performance after using it without TRIM. Quite possible that the state of the drive after torture without TRIM is very different to anything you can get when TRIM is active.It would be interesting to compare your test to real life scenario, with NTFS partition and working TRIM.
Kristian Vättö - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
With most SSDs, formatting the drive will fully restore it's performance, so the behavior we're seeing here is not completely normal.Remember that even if TRIM is active at all times, sending a TRIM command to the controller does not mean the data will be erased immediately. If you're constantly writing to the SSD, the controller may not have time to do garbage collection in real time and hence the SSD may be pushed to a very fragmented state as in our test where, as we can see, TRIM doesn't work perfectly.
I know that our test may not translate to real world in most cases, but it's still a possible scenario if the drive is hammered enough.
JellyRoll - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
If the majority of your tests are conducted without a partition that means none of the storage bench results are with TRIM?