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.

The Corsair drive performed extremely well in our benchmarks. In our large file write and read tests we saw speeds of 321MB/s and 416MB/s. The drive’s large write speeds may be slower, but read speeds are not far off the much more expensive Corsair Performance Series Pro, which scored 484MB/s and 409MB/s.

The Force GS continued to perform well in the small file benchmarks, with write speeds of 146MB/s and 100MB/s, which are only marginally behind the Performance Series Pro’s speeds.

It’s a good-looking drive, and in the box is a 3.5in to 2.5in adapter and the relevant screws. The drive also has a three-year warranty, but this falls behind the five-year warranty of market leaders such as Crucial.

The only area in which the Force GS falls down compared to Corsair’s more expensive Performance Pro drive is when writing large files – in all other tests it’s nearly as quick. Couple that with its very reasonable price and you have an excellent SSD. It’s a Best Buy.