Corsair Force GT & Performance Pro SATA III SSD Roundup
Corsair Offers Compelling SSD Choices
As the landscape of SSD drives continues to evolve, it becomes more difficult for consumers to discern the good drives from the not so good and which ones offer a good value. To make it tougher, many manufacturers have several different lines of drives that offer various levels of performance. Corsair is one such manufacturer and they’ve sent us over three drives to test out around the same time so we thought it’d be good to do a roundup to give some head to head comparisons. We have a pair of SandForce based Force GT drives – one at 180GB and a larger one at 240GB. Also in the mix is a single Performance Pro 256GB drive which has the latest Marvell controller. All three have a SATA III interface and a three-year warranty.
All three are priced similarly in terms of cost per GB. The lowest capacity Force GT comes in around $289 online followed by its bigger brother 240GB at $390. The Performance Pro rounds out the bunch at $399. In terms of performance, the Force GT’s are a little bit faster in terms of raw speed with max reads and writes topping out at 555MB/s and 525MB/s respectively. The Performance Pro’s specifications are bit more modest but nowhere near what we’d consider slow at 515MB/s and 440MB/s reads and writes. Since they have different controllers, the speed differences between the two lines is not surprising but max specifications can be deceiving as some of the benchmarks will attest.
Outside of performance, many of the specifications are more or less equal.
Corsair Force GT 180GB, 240GB & Performance Pro 256GB Features & specs:
| Force GT 180GB | Force GT 240GB | Performance Pro 256GB | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Part # | CSSD-F180GBGT-BK | CSSD-F240GBGT-BK | CSSD-P256GBP-BK |
| Unformatted Capacity | 180GB | 240GB | 256GB |
| Read Performance (max) | 555 MB/s | 555 MB/s | 515 MB/s |
| Write Performance (max) | 525 MB/s | 525 MB/s | 440 MB/s |
| Random Write 4k (max) | 85k IOPS (4k aligned) | 85k IOPS (4k aligned) | 65k IOPS (4k aligned) |
| Form Factor | 2.5 | 2.5 | 2.5″ |
| Interface Type | SATA 3 6Gb/s | SATA 3 6Gb/s | SATA 3 6Gb/s |
| Onboard cache | NA | NA | 512MB |
| Shock | 1500 G | 1500 G | 1500 G |
| Power Consumption (active) | 2.5W Max | 4.6W Max | 1.4A |
| S.M.A.R.T. Support | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| MTBF | 2,000,000 hours | 2,000,000 hours | 1,500,000 hours |
| Warranty | Three Years | Three Years | Three Years |
In terms of packaging and design, they are very much the same as well with similar branding. While the Force GT’s have a fiery red exterior shell, the Performance Pro has a less in-your-face silver color.
The drive colors are matched on the boxes with read and silver being the predominant colors (outside of black and white). Included with each is a 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter plate which comes in handy if you don’t have a newer case that supports 2.5″ drive natively. The new Corsair cases do support 2.5″ drives so if you want to stick with a Corsair themed system.
That about covers the introduction. Let’s have a look inside to clearly delineate the hardware differences.
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