Corsair's Force SSD Reviewed: SF-1200 is Very Good
by Anand Lal Shimpi on April 14, 2010 2:27 AM ESTTRIM Performance
The SF-1200 fully supports TRIM and to test it out I peppered the Corsair Force drive with random writes and used HD Tach to look at sequential read/write speed across all LBAs of the used drive.
Remember we should be seeing sequential read/write performance of around 265/251 MB/s:
Performance is down, as you'd expect, but not to unbearable levels and it's also pretty consistent. While most drives will have worse write performance than read performance, if you look closely you'll see that read speed falls further than write speed. Perhaps all of the tracking overhead is making calculating and retrieving data more difficult? Remember that you can't just read data back from the SF drive since the full data isn't stored, you have to perform math on the stored data to retrieve what was actually written.
I then TRIMed the entire contents of the drive and re-ran the test:
Performance looks better. It's not at peak performance yet (~78% of peak read speed, 93% of peak write speed) but TRIM appears to be working relatively aggressively. The SandForce controller is very resilient, especially when combined with TRIM. My only concern continues to be long term reliability of these drives.
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marc_soad - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - link
If I'm not wrong, what the author means is 2 000 000 hours = 83 333 days = 228 years.So the drive is meant to fail after 228 years if it's powered on all the time, or more if the computer is powered on only for a portion of the day.
Thanks for the review by the way! :)
p05esto - Friday, April 16, 2010 - link
Hey, I COMPLETELY agree with the printing thing....I hate articles that have "pages", I'd rather view a 10 page long single document....yes, I'm that frickin lazy. You shouldn't remove the pages, but offer a FULL view option? I use the print option sometimes as well just to read an article all at once.poee - Friday, July 16, 2010 - link
"Performance is down, as you'd expect, but not to unbearable levels and it's also pretty consistent."Why is performance down? Why should we "expect" this? Do I have to read every SSD article you've written previously to understand new articles? Or is there one big article that has all the info that you obliquely allude to in subsequent articles?
Where can I find the current recommendations for SSDs (SandForce vs Indilinx vs Intel vs Micron vs Samsung, latest firmware updates, etc.)? Is there a central repository of SSD information that is assimilated and arranged categorically (for easy research), or must all this info be followed like a blog?