Corsair Force GT 240GB RAID 0 TRIM SSD Review Storage   Page 1

Reviewer: Jon Coulter Article Publish Date: 11/28/2012

 

 

 

 

Introduction

 

We decided to re-visit one of our all-time favorite drives the Corsair Force GT 240GB. What has prompted this re-examination is RAID 0 TRIM. The Force GT can now be updated to 503 firmware and therefore we can run a pair of these drives in RAID 0 with 5 series performance AND have functioning TRIM. Some may say that the LSI 2281/2282 Flash Processing Unit is getting a little long in the tooth being that 2281/2282 has been utilized for much longer than any other FPU. There is a reason for this longevity and that is because the compression technology utilized by the 2281/2282 is still one of the fastest overall flash solutions of all time.

The Force GT’s we will be running today are a later version and have 32 Flash Chips per drive which provides a greater parallelism and should provide slightly better performance than versions with 16 Flash Chips per drive. To properly utilize all those flash chips Corsair is using an LSI 2282 flash processor instead of the usual 2281 FPU because, a 2281 processor can access a maximum of 16 NAND flash chips but, a 2282 processor has the ability to assess up to 32 NAND flash chips. All those Flash Chips will require more power to operate so we recommend these drives be installed in desktop machines. The Corsair Force GT’s are available for a very low cost these days and are probably the best value to performance available today.

We now do all of our RAID 0 reviews with data on array or fill testing to show how a 2 drive array will perform with various amounts of data on the array and more importantly how well TRIM functions within the array or if its functioning at all. This will also be our first RAID 0 TRIM review with complete charts throughout so you can compare this array to other arrays we’ve tested. In addition to this we are introducing a couple of new charts, one for Anvil’s testing and one for AS SSD testing.

There are a few prerequisites for functioning RAID 0 TRIM. 1) You must be running an Intel Z77 board, processor doesn’t matter you can use any 1155 socket CPU. 2) You must have an 11 series OROM as part of your BIOS which should come already built in on any Z77 board. 3) You must be running an 11 or higher series Intel RST storage driver. The last prerequisite is your drives must have functioning TRIM which is a prerequisite of course for a single drive as well. For a more in-depth analysis of functioning TRIM verses non-functioning TRIM (click here).