Corsair Announces Force Series GS SSDs
By - Source: Tom's Hardware US
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Corsair has announced a new line of LSI SandForce SSDs, which offer the fastest overall performance in its SandForce-based lineup.
The Force Series GS SSDs are powered by a LSI SandForce SF-2200 controller and Toggle NAND memory. The series is available in capacities of 180 GB, 240 GB, 340 GB and 480 GB. It is based on a 2.5-inch form factor SATA 6.0 GB/s interface, with a 3.5-inch adapter for easy installation into a PC. 
Performance:
| Capacity | 180 GB | 240 GB | 340 GB | 480 GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Max Sequential Read (ATTO) | 555 MB/s | 555 MB/s | 555 MB/s | 540 MB/s |
| Max Sequential Write (ATTO) | 525 MB/s | 525 MB/s | 530 MB/s | 455 MB/s |
| Max Random 4k Write (IOMeter 08) | 90,000 IOPS | 90,000 IOPS | 50,000 IOPS | 50,000 IOPS |

The Force Series GS SSDs are immediately available with prices starting at $189.99 for 180 GB, $239.99 for 240 GB, $349.99 for 340 GB and $489.99 for 480 GB capacities. You can learn more about the new Force Series GS at Corsair's website or blog.
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Regardless, I think that it would be nice to see more than the mere three performance metrics that this article supplies us with. I can't take anything out of this other than to wait and see because of the lack of data and the peculiarities surrounding the higher capacity model's lower performance. I'd rather get a Vertex 4 if I had to buy a drive based off of current information rather than these.
In my opinion, an SSD manufacturer should not make their drives so questionable like this and not give any information to put any worries to rest unless these drives have problems that would have been revealed had Corsair done so. Considering Corsairs fairly good track record, I'd expect there to not be many severe problems, so this definitely sparks my curiosity, but that's all that it managed to do. Any other thoughts?
Any chance you can address this?
Utilizing even a "old" Pcie V2.0 with 4 lanes would give 2GB/sec raw transfers (or make it look large like the console company's marketed at 16 Gbit/s =). Practically i would guess around a 1.7 GB/Sec ceiling due to the overhead from encoding (8b/10b) and command overhead.
I would like to see a ssd card fully utilizing a 3.0 16x buss (Would be raw at about 16GB / sec or 128Gbit/s in console terms and the Pcie 3.0 standard also has a better encoding (128b/130b) with only about 1.5% overhead compared to 20% in the pcie 2.0).
Actually, a single PCIe 2.0 lane is 5Gb/s and it's 8/10 encoding makes it an effective data transfer of 4Gb/s, so an x4 link truly is 2GB/s. PCIe 3.0's data rate is only 60% higher at 8Gb/s, but like you said, it uses a much more efficient encoding in order to get the near doubling of effective bandwidth.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/280390-32-sata-satae
I remember reading this in a Tom's article itself, so maybe you could look at the SSD reviews from last year.
The 512GB Vertex 4 is faster than the 256GB Vertex 4, so that's not always true. Looking at just most of the 512GB SSDs on Newegg, you can see that most of them are the same performance as their 256GB little brother and only a few are slower.
From what I've read these drivers dont work like that... they allow a disk that is not a member of a raid volume but attached on the same controller to work with TRIM. Essentially still meaning no RAID0 and TRIM for SSD. In fairness whether TRIM is even necessary is up for debate if the firmware of the drive has good enough garbage collection.
There are ways to use TRIM in RAID 1 and RAID 0. It's the other levels (aka the *true* levels) of RAID that still don't seem to have TRIM support. Furthermore, any drive can be put in RAID 0. If there isn't hardware support for it, such as some PCIe SSDs, then it can be done with software RAID. Generally, only SandForce drives have good enough garbage collection without TRIM for RAID, so for RAID other than 0 and 1 (maybe derivatives of them such as 10 and 0+1 too), then SandForce is usually the only good way to go.
I can get EVEN better transfer rates with two force 3 SSDs in Raid 0, and still cheaper, faster, AND bootable!!
How about four Vertex 3 (or similarly performing SandForce drive with good prices, Mushkin and Intel have good competitors here that might be arguably better choices) 120GBs with four 30GB partitions each, all in a software RAID 5 array? Fairly reliable (no big deal if one or even all but one volume fails), high performance, and minimal loss of capacity since RAID5 only cuts out 1/x of the total capacity where x is the number of volumes and with four per drive and four drives meaning sixteen volumes, that's only a drop of a few percent. Some of these drives can go below $.7 per GB and that's about as cheap per GB as one can get with high performance SSDs.