Corsair Force GT 120GB SSD Review

For some time the manufacturer who seemed to be taking the lead as far as SSD controllers go was Indilinx. Drives based on their technology were available from pretty much every major brand, excluding Intel and performance was impressive compared to other models in the same generation.

Somewhat surprisingly though, rather than capitalise on this advantage Indilinx struggled to release a next generation platform that was appealing and through some rather good timing SandForce were just entering the market with their 1200 series controller. Drives based around that, including Corsair's Force series, were very popular and hit speeds close to those possible on SATA 2.

SandForce didn't make the same mistake as Indilinx though and were quick to market with a follow-up, the SATA 3 based 2200 controller which we saw in a number of drives earlier this year. There are various different ways that a SSD can be tuned though, depending on firmware and the components used and this opens up possibilities for manufacturers such as Corsair who can release products such as the Force GT.

The Force GT is the latest in Corsair's range of SandForce based SSDs and features a tweaked architecture which should benefit reading and writing of music and video files (uncompressible data). Today we will be putting the 120GB model through a selection of synthetic and real world tests to find out how it compares to an alternative model which is also tuned for OS use rather than maximum IOPS.