Corsair releases Force Series GS SSDs

Corsair has released a new line of solid state drives based on its Force series. The drives are still equipped with SandForce controllers, but the Force GS drives also received onboard cache.

The new Force GS series will come in capacities of at least 180GB: the smaller 60GB and 120GB variants such as those of the Force 3 drives will be skipped. The GS series is primarily aimed at performance-hungry consumers: Corsair claims write speeds of up to 90,000iops. Not so much the SF2281 controller used, but the flash memory would be responsible for that.

Corsair uses toggle flash for the Force GS drives, which is theoretically twice as fast as normal asynchronous flash memory via a DDR interface. Using toggle flash should provide performance similar to synchronous flash memory, but slightly simpler in structure as a clock signal is not needed. Corsair previously released the Force 3 SSDs with asynchronous memory, the Force GTs with synchronous memory and now the Force GS with toggle flash.

The Force GS drives come in capacities of 180GB, 240GB, 360GB, and 480GB. Only the 240GB drives are available immediately, the rest will have to wait a little longer. Incidentally, only the two smaller drives achieve 90,000iops when writing: the two larger drives would get stuck at 50,000iops.