Corsair Force GT 120GB SSD Review - PAGE 1

SandForce technlogy has effectively dominated the SSD market for the last year, and even while the OCZ and INDILINX merger could provide additional competition in the future, the SandForce controller is still for the most part unchallenged. The reason SandForce has been able to maintain it hold on the market is it's fast transfer speeds and quick adoption of the SATA 6Gbp/s interface. This has lead to SandForce drives supporting extremely fast read and write speeds of above 500MB/s, and having a random 4K write performance of up to 85,000 IOPS.

The Corsair Force GT drive we are examining today utilizes the latest SF-2000 SSD processor and is currently the fastest of the Corsair drives released to date. Thanks to the SandForce controller it is able to support read speeds of up to 555MB/s, and 515 MB/sec writes. This makes it an extremely fast SSD, but the real ace in the hole for the Force GT is that is uses high quality 25nm ONFI synchronous NAND flash memory. This gives the Force GT drive an advantage when it comes to transferring large uncompressed data by increasing the throughput, allowing the Force GT to perform better than other SSDs using cheaper asynchronous memory.

The type of NAND being used in each drive is the biggest difference we are seeing with this generation of SandForce drives, and Corsair's decision to use 25nm ONFI synchronous NAND flash memory could be both a positive and negative for the Force GT. As stated before, this memory gives the Force GT better performance when reading and writing compressed data data such as music, video and graphic files, but on the other hand synchronous memory is more expensive than asynchronous, which gives the Force GT drives a higher premium than those using cheaper flash memory.