Corsair Force GS 240GB review

Corsair makes some very fast SSDs, with the Corsair Performance Series Pro recently winning an Ultimate award. That’s a £275 drive, though, so we were keen to see if the cheaper GS-series models would bring some of that speed to those on a lower budget.

This 240GB model, which provides 223GB when formatted, costs a more reasonable £165. That works out at just 68p per gigabyte, which makes it one of the cheaper performance-orientated drives available.

Corsair has managed this by combining a middling controller with high-speed memory chips. The controller in question is the SandForce SF-2281, which has been popping up in SSDs for almost as long as the drives have been popular. It’s undeniably a reasonable performer, but it’s been outpaced by other controllers such as the Marvell 88SS9174 in Corsair’s Performance Pro series.

Corsair has propped up the ageing SandForce controller with Toggle Mode NAND memory. It’s the first time we’ve seen this high-performance memory in a mid-range drive, which bodes well for the Force GS’s performance.