Corsair Force GT 180GB Review Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: Jon Coulter Article Publish Date: 4/13/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

It’s hard to keep track of all the LSI Sandforce drives we have reviewed as they are the most plentiful of all SSD’s. Most SSD Manufacturers have several versions of LSI Sandforce Driven drives to offer the consumer. The vast majority of the SandForce driven drives have been based on the LSI SandForce 2281 solid state drive processor. I would have to say the 2281 processor is without doubt the most successful SSD Processor ever made to date. Some of you may not know this but the SF 2281 is not the most powerful 2200 series processor. That title belongs to the 2282 version of the controller.

 

The 2282 processor differs from the 2281 in one very important way. The 2281 has 8 byte lanes and 256 pins. The 2282 has 400 pins and 16 byte lanes giving the 2282 the ability to access more NAND Modules. This may or may not translate to higher performance depending on the NAND configuration. For example having tested the OWC Mercury Extreme 6G; its second configuration utilized a LSI SandForce 2282 controller but its NAND configuration did not take advantage of the 2282 processors capabilities and there was no performance increase. Performance could theoretically be increased by using more NAND modules to increase parallel transfers slightly but the real purpose is to increase capacity.

 

 

Corsair has chosen to offer their 180GB drives with the LSI SandForce 2282 processor which naturally peaked our interest at the lab. In addition it seems Corsair has chosen to take advantage of the increased parallelism and use more NAND modules, 24 modules to be exact. Will this translate to better performance?  First let’s take a quick look at the specifications as given by Corsair.