Corsair Force GT SATA 3 240GB SSD Review – This GT Is Some Force To Reckon With!

Corsair recently announced new capacities for both the Series 3 and Force GT lines of their SSD family making them the easy winner in capacity selection for any single SSD series choice that we know of.

Shortly after that announcement, a Corsair Force GT SATA 3 240GB SSD arrived at the office and we couldn’t resist the chance to throw it on the bench and see the numbers this GT could push.

From the looks of it at least, the GT is on fire!

INTRODUCTION

Its no secret that we think Corsair has hit a home run in their choice of name, color and packaging for their GT line.  Once the SSD is in the system though, looks are all but forgotten and the only thing most people see are performance results.  The Corsair Force GT line is available in 60, 90, 120, 180 and 240GB capacities and specifications list this drive as being capable of 555MB/s read and 525MB/s write with 85,000 IOPS at 4k aligned write disk access.

The exterior packaging is rather compact as it is only 5″ long by 4.5″ wide and 1″ thick.  The package front contains most of the information we like to see such as a picture of the SSD, its capacity, the fact that it is SATA 3 as well as performance speeds.  The back contains the sales pitch in several languages and we also noticed that Corsair has included a 3.5″ adapter for those desktop users.

Located inside the box is the SSD in a one piece plastic insert that opens easily as well as the 3.5″ adapter with included screws for the installation.

CASE AND COMPONENTS

The case itself is two piece and a bit different than the typical SSD case we are used to seeing.  The cover of the GT is a red aluminum cast while the base plate is black and held in place by four screws, one of which has the standard security tape to prevent tampering.

In opening the drive, we can see that the printed circuit board (PCB) is not the standard size and is secured by three screws to the base plate.  The PCB contains the SandForce SF-2281 6Gbps processor along with 16 pieces of Micron 25nm synchronous NAND flash memory (29F128G08CFAAB), each piece being of a 16GB capacity.

This particular stock of memory is probably the most popular, originally showing itself in the OCZ Vertex 3, and followed shortly after by the Crucial M4, OWC 6G and a few other popular SSD brands.

As stated, the Corsair 240GB GT contains 16 modules of 16GB NAND flash memory for a total RAW capacity of 256GB.  SandForce then requires one module of 16GB for over provisioning and firmware needs which leaves us with the advertised capacity of 240GB.  Formatting then leaves the end user with 224GB of available storage.