SSD Review: Corsair Force GS 240GB RAID Review Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: Jon Coulter Article Publish Date: 8/20/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

 

 

After reading our single drive review of the Corsair Force GS (click here), Corsair decided to send us another drive so we could do a RAID 0 review. A single Corsair GS was very impressive, managing to break a few of our records and put up one of the best all-around performances we have ever seen. Here at RWL we like to do as many RAID 0 reviews as possible because they are so impressive and receive very little attention from most other review sites. Our philosophy when it comes to testing solid state drives is simple really; we want to showcase what a drive is capable of, in capable hands, using solid testing methodology. We want to present you with benchmarks and real-world results that are accurate and in a common form that you can use yourself, not some special home brew that’s hard for readers to repeat themselves and doesn’t have enough commonality amongst readers and other reviewers to be relevant when comparing reviews.

 

The Corsair Force GS is Corsairs latest top tier drive offering. The Force GS is the first drive Corsair has offered that is SandForce and Toggle mode memory based. As we saw in our evaluation of a single GS this is one of the most, if not the most potent combination ever made available to the consumer via the SATA III platform.

 

Our drives were shipped to us with 5.02 firmware which unfortunately means we can’t bring you a RAID 0 review with functioning TRIM just yet. We would be able to if 5.03 firmware which has been confirmed to restore TRIM (click here) were already made public but, as of yet it has not been made public. We have already established that with an 11 series OROM and an 11 series RST driver that RAID 0, TRIM and Windows 7 go together like bread and butter, provided you have a Z77 board to throw into the mix (click here). Reviews beginning with the next one will be done on a Z77 board so we can do our RAID 0 reviews with TRIM functioning which will bring Vantage fill testing into our RAID 0 reviews.

 

The Corsair Force GS 240GB is outfitted with the most powerful SSD flash processor on the market today, an LSI SandForce 2281 processor. We have RAIDED many a drive based on this flash processor and what stands out is the way the SandForce drives “OVERSCALE”, meaning that 2 drives will actually produce more than double the performance of a single drive, when configured in RAID 0. Most drives based on other flash processors can over scale but, not nearly as much as LSI SandForce based drives do. The Corsair GS is a fine piece of engineering with its shorter board designed to increase signal clarity which increases reliability. Corsair’s commitment to performance and innovation is exemplified by the GS and that has us chomping at the bit so let’s get into this review.