Corsair Force LS 240GB SSD Review - Introduction

Corsairs Budget Friendly Force LS SSD Gets Tested

Corsair has released the Force LS series SSD, and we review it. This is the arrival of the new 19nm MLC based Force LS series for consumers. The LS line of solid-state storage units is actually a bit faster than most high-end drives made of NAND chips (Toggle) yet, is intended as the more affordable SSD series within the Corsair lineup. The SSDs are rated with a whopping 560 MB/s sequential read (530 MB/sec write) speed running over the all too familiar SATA 6.0 Gbps connection interface. Interesting, however, is a relatively unknown controller, a Phison controller is being used. And as our results will show you, Phison can compete just fine with Marvell and Sandforce/LSI. The LS makes use of the normal 2.5-inch form factor and has a thickness of 7mm. TRIM is supported, of course. 

Now, we've been testing NAND Flash based storage ever since the very beginning. And I've stated it a couple of times already, it really is surprising to see where we have gotten. The SSD market is fierce and crowded though. While stability and safety of your data have become a number one priority for the manufacturers, the technology keeps advancing in a fast pace as it does, the performance numbers a good SSD offers these days are simply breathtaking. A 450 to 550 MB/sec on SATA3 is the norm for a single controller based SSD. Next to that the past year NAND flash memory (the storage memory used inside an SSD) has become much cheaper as well. Prices now roughly settle just under 1 USD per GB. That was two to threefold two years ago. As such SSD technology and NAND storage has gone mainstream. The market is huge, fierce and competitive, but it brought us where we are today... nice volume SSDs at acceptable prices with very fast performance. Not one test system in my lab has an HDD, everything runs on SSD while I receive and retrieve my bigger chunks of data from a NAS server here in the office. The benefits are performance, speed, low power consumption and no noise. You can say that I evangelize SSDs, yes Sir .. I am a fan, an SSD addict if you will.

With capacities of 60 GB, 120 GB and 240 GB, and respective prices of $70 / €60, $110 / €100, and $200 / €175, respectively. But nuff said, have a peek and let's start-up the review shall we?

Corsair Force LS SSD value SSD with 19nm Toshiba NAND and the Phison PS3108-S8 controller