SandForce TRIM Issue & Corsair Force Series GS (240GB) Review

SandForce and TRIM—that has always been a tricky combination. SandForce SSDs have always behaved a bit differently when tortured and TRIM'ed due to their internal design. When a non-SandForce SSD is tortured, write speed degrades and sooner than later you will end up with a read-modify-write situation. SandForce, on the other hand, uses a real-time compression engine which minimizes NAND writes; thanks to that, write speed doesn't degrade when the drive is tortured with easily compressible data. However, in exchange, read speed is affected if the drive is tortured with compressible writes. Incompressible data will also push SandForce to a corner as it can't take advantage of compression, and that's a corner even TRIM can't pull the drive out of.

Quite a few new SandForce SSDs are using a newer 5.0.x firmware, which does not have a fully working TRIM. Some are still using 3.x.x firmware without the TRIM issue but if you have a SandForce SSD that was recently released, there is a good chance its TRIM is broken. To test the TRIM issue, we used Corsair's new Force GS SSD with firmware 5.0.2, and Corsair was also kind enough to send us the 5.0.3 firmware that supposedly fixes TRIM. Read on to find more about the TRIM issue and how Corsair's Force GS performs.