SandForce TRIM Issue & Corsair Force Series GS (240GB) Review

The 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.

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.

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.

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only quote the prices at the time of writing, there is a good chance that our pricing table will be at least somewhat out of date in less than a week.