SandForce TRIM Issue & Corsair Force Series GS (240GB) Review
by Kristian Vättö on November 22, 2012 1:00 PM ESTThe Corsair Force GS
Now that the TRIM issue is out of the way, it's time to take a closer look at Corsair's Force GS SSD. Not much has happened in the SandForce SSD frontier for a while and the Force GS isn't exactly special either. As with most SandForce based SSDs, it's based on SandForce's SF-2281 controller, although Corsair has chosen SanDisk, a bit more uncommon choice, as the NAND supplier. SanDisk's NAND uses the same Toggle-Mode interface as Toshiba's and Samsung's NAND, which is rarer in SandForce SSDs than ONFi NAND. That's not to say that the Force GS is the first Toggle-Mode NAND based SandFroce SSD; there are quite a few that use Toggle-Mode NAND as well, such as OWC's Mercury 6G and Mushkin's Chronos Deluxe.
| Comparison of NAND Interfaces | ||||||
| ONFi | Toggle-Mode | |||||
| Manufacturers | IMFT (Intel, Micron, Spectec), Hynix | Toshiba/SanDisk, Samsung | ||||
| Version | 1.0 | 2.0 | 2.x | 3.0 | 1.0 | 2.0 |
| Max Bandwidth | 50MB/s | 133MB/s | 200MB/s | 400MB/s | 166MB/s | 400MB/s |
By using Toggle-Mode NAND, Corsair claims to achieve slightly higher write speeds than ONFi based SandForce SSDs, although the difference is only about 5MB/s in sequential write and 5K IOPS in 4K random write. While SanDisk NAND is quite rare, it should not be of lower quality than any other NAND. Toshiba and SanDisk have a NAND joint venture similar to Intel's and Micron's IMFT: SanDisk owns 49.9% and Toshiba owns the remaining 50.1% of the joint venture. As the NAND comes from the same fabs, there is no physical difference between SanDisk and Toshiba NAND, although validation methods may of course be different.
| Corsair Force Series GS Specifications | ||||
| User Capacity | 180GB | 240GB | 360GB | 480GB |
| Controller | SandForce SF-2281 | |||
| NAND | SanDisk 24nm Toggle-Mode MLC NAND | |||
| Raw NAND Capacity | 192GiB | 256GiB | 384GiB | 512GiB |
| Number of NAND Packages | 12 | 16 | 12 | 16 |
| Number of Die per Package | 2 | 2 | 4 | 4 |
| Sequential Read | 555MB/s | 555MB/s | 555MB/s | 555MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 525MB/s | 525MB/s | 530MB/s | 455MB/s |
| Max 4K Random Write | 90K IOPS | 90K IOPS | 50K IOPS | 50K IOPS |
The interesting thing in Force GS are the available capacities; Corsair isn't offering anything smaller than 180GB and there is also a more uncommon 360GB model included. As explained in our pipeline article of the Force GS launch, 180GB and 360GB models are achieved by running the SF-2281 controller in 6-channel mode and using either 6 or 12 NAND packages. Corsair only had 240GB review samples available, but they promised to send us a 360GB sample once they get them.
| Price Comparison (11/22/2012) | |||||
| 120/128GB | 180GB | 240/256GB | 360GB | 480/512GB | |
| Corsair Force GS | N/A | $160 | $220 | $315 | $400 |
| Corsair Force GT | $130 | $185 | $220 | N/A | $390 |
| Corsair Neutron | $120 | N/A | $213 | N/A | N/A |
| Plextor M5S | $110 | N/A | $200 | N/A | N/A |
| Crucial m4 | $110 | N/A | $185 | N/A | $389 |
| Intel 520 Series | $130 | $190 | $234 | N/A | $370 |
| Samsung SSD 830 | $104 | N/A | $200 | N/A | $550 |
| OCZ Vertex 3 | $89 | N/A | $200 | N/A | $425 |
| OCZ Vertex 4 | $75 | N/A | $160 | N/A | $475 |
| Mushkin Chronos Deluxe | $100 | N/A | $180 | N/A | N/A |
Force GS is priced competitively against other SSDs at all capacities. All capacities are priced noticeably below $1 per GB, even the not so common 180GB and 360GB models. Of course, it should be kept in mind that SSD prices change frequently (e.g. some of the models like the 480GB Vertex 3 have dropped in price by 30% or more in the past two months!), so you should do your own research before buying. We can only quote the prices at the time of writing, there is a good chance that our pricing table will be at least somewhat out of date in less than a week.
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Kristian Vättö - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
That is correct, Storage bench tests are run on a drive without a partition.Running tests on a drive with a partition vs without a partition is something I've discussed with other storage editors quite a bit and there isn't really an optimal way to test things. We prefer to test without a partition because that is the only way we can ensure that the OS doesn't cause any additional anomalies but that means the drive may behave slightly differently with a file system than what you see in our tests.
JellyRoll - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Well personally I think that testing devices that are designed to operate in a certain environment is important. You are testing SSDs that are designed for a filesystem and TRIM, without a filesystem and TRIM. This means that the traces that you are running aren't indicative of real performance at all, the drives are functioning without the benefit of their most important aspect, TRIM. This explains why Anandtech is just now reporting the lack of TRIM support when other sites have been reporting this for months.Testing in an unrealistic environment with different datasets than those that are actually used when recording (your tools do not use the actual data, it uses substituted data that is highly compressible), in a TRIM free environment is like testing a Formula One car in a school zone.
This is the problem with proprietary traces. Readers have absolutely no idea if these results are valid, and surprise, they are not!
extide - Saturday, November 24, 2012 - link
The drive has NO IDEA id there is a partition on it or not. All the drive has to do is store data at a bunch of different addresses. That's it. Whether there is a partition or not has no difference, it's all just 0's and 1's to the drive.JellyRoll - Saturday, November 24, 2012 - link
it IS all ones and zeros my friend, but TRIM is a command issued by the Operating System. NOT the drive. This is why XP does not support TRIM for instance, and several older operating systems also do not support it. That is merely because they do not issue the TRIM command. The OS issues the TRIM commands, but only as a function of the file system that is managing it. :)No file system=no TRIM.
JellyRoll - Saturday, November 24, 2012 - link
exceprts from the defiition of TRIM from WIKI:Because of the way that file systems typically handle delete operations, storage media (SSDs, but also traditional hard drives) generally do not know which sectors/pages are truly in use and which can be considered free space.
Since a common SSD has no access to the file system structures, including the list of unused clusters, the storage medium remains unaware that the blocks have become available.
popej - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
Different drives, different algorithms and different results. But since you are testing drive well outside normal use you should draw conclusion with care, not all could be relevant to standard application.R3dox - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
I've read everything (afaik) on AT on SSDs the past few years and the powersaving features used to be disabled in reviews. They, at least at some point, significantly affect performance. Back then I bought an Intel 80GB postville SSD and all tests I ran confirmed that these settings have quite a big impact.I currently have an Intel 520 (though sadly limited by a 3Gbps SATA controller on my old core i7 920 platform) and I never thought of turning everything on again, so I wonder whether the problem is solved with newer drives. Did I miss something or why aren't these settings disabled anymore? Hopefully it's not a feature of newer platforms.
It would be nice if the next big SSD piece would cover this (or feel free to point me to an older one that does :)). I'd really like this to be clarified, if possible.
Bullwinkle J Moose - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
I was kinda wondering something similarAHCI might give you a sleight performance boost, but does it affect the "Consistency" of the test results having NCQ enabled or the power saving features of AHCI or the O.S. itself
I always test my SSD's in the worst case scenario's to find bottom
XP
No Trim (Not even O&O Defrag Pro's manual Trim)
Heavy Defragging to test reliability while still under return policy
yank the drives power while running
Stuff like that
I predicted that my Vertex 2 would die if I ever updated the firmware as I have been tellyng people for the past few years and YES, it finally Died right after the firmware update
It was still under warranty but I seriously do not want another one
Time for me to thrash a Samsung 256GB 840 pro
I feel sorry for it already
Sniff
Bullwinkle J Moose - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
I forgotMisaligned partitions and firmware updates during the return policy will also be used for testing any of my new drives during the return policy
I don't trust my data to a drive I haven't tested in a worst case scenario
Kristian Vättö - Friday, November 23, 2012 - link
EIST and Turbo were disabled when we ran our tests on a Nehalem based platform (that was before AnandTech Storage Bench 2011) but have been enabled since that. Some of our older SSD reviews have a typo in the table which shows that those would be disabled in our current setup as well, but that's because Anand forget to remove those lines when updating the spec table for our Sandy Bridge build.