Corsair Announces Force Series GS SSDs

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:

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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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20 Comments Comment from the forums

kronos_cornelius

But you can get better transfer rates (900MB/s) if you use PCIe, why not focus on those instead.
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A Bad Day

The 240GB model seems to be the most cost efficient, and the and 340GB 480GB for some reason has lower performance.
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halcyon

$1/GB Nice. ...and its by Corsair, so you know its nice kit. 2 x 240GB for RAID 0 seems kinda tasty here.
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blazorthon

Funny, but don't SSDs usually improve in performance as capacity improves, not the other way around like these drives seem to behave? The prices are good and the performance is good, but I'd never buy the 340GB or the 480GB even if I had the money for it... The trade-off is not worth it IMO, especially when you can just get two 240GB drives or four 120GB drives and do some RAID with or without parity. If they're reliable drives, then RAID 0 should be fine and RAID 0 can be done while keeping TRIM if you have proper drivers, so the effectiveness of it would mainly depend on the reliability of the drives.

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?
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mesab66

+1 on improved PCIe based SSD coverage (many advantages over SATA) - they're not even mentioned in any of tom's 'best SSD's' benchmark comparison tables.....yet $500-1000 gfx cards are constantly discussed.

Any chance you can address this?
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rantoc

kronos_corneliusBut you can get better transfer rates (900MB/s) if you use PCIe, why not focus on those instead.
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).

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blazorthon

rantocUtilizing 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.
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josejones

^ Yep, I'm looking forward to SSD's running at 12 to 16g/ps on a PCIe card with 3.0 support.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/280390-32-sata-satae
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DRosencraft

Yes, PCIE SSDs do and would run at remarkably fast speeds. The problem is that they are not nearly as cost-effective as regular SSDs. A 120GB PCIE SSD can run near $300, that's twice what you can get a good SATA SSD of the same size for. Additionally, from what I've seen, they have sketchy reliability and performance records. Finally, I would note that here on Tom's it's more likely that a PC with any open PCIE slots have them either for cooling space between GPUs, or they're waiting for another GPU to Crossfire/SLI. I wouldn't imagine much attention paid to PCIE SSDs at this point.
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Onus

Hmmm, another Sandfarce. I'll wait for some reliability data.

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