Corsair Force GT 180GB SSD Drive Review

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The SSD market is growing rapidly with each passing day and became even more attractive after the recent catastrophe in Thailand which caused the prices of mechanical drives to rise significantly. One of the leading SSD providers is Corsair, which may have started off as a RAM modules manufacturer but today is famous for their many enthusiast-class products. A few months ago we reviewed a SSD from their fastest series of drives, the 120GB Force GT. Corsair soon afterwards released slightly better, larger versions of the drives utilizing the same controller. Today we are going to have a look at one of those drives, the 180GB Force GT SSD.

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The Force GT 180GT drive comes supplied inside a small and relatively simple cardboard box with a black/red theme. The drive weights only 80gr and requires no special shock protection, therefore the small box offers more than enough protection during shipping.



Inside the box there is only a simple black 2.5” to 3.5” adapter and mounting screws for installing the drive inside a desktop case which does not natively support 2.5” devices.



Corsair’s Force GT drives are easily distinguishable by their striking red metallic casing. The bright red color gives the product a “sporty” appearance and modders will probably like it, at least when the red color matches the overall theme of their system.





The bottom metallic plate of the drive is black and entirely clean, with the exception of the small warranty sticker found on retail drives.



Removing the metallic plate reveals the green PCB of the drive. The controller chip can be seen at the left side while six of the flash memory chips can be seen to the right.



The Corsair Force GT 180GB drive still utilizes the same Sandforce SF-2281 controller we saw in the smaller 120GB drive and in the Force 3 series drives.



The flash memory chips are manufactured by Micron and their part number is 29F128G08CBAAB-A, which have double the capacity and slightly better performance than the 29F64G08CBAAB-12A chips we found in the Force GT 120GB drive.

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Test system setup:

Intel Core i5-2500K @ 4.8GHz
Be Quiet Dark Rock Pro C1 CPU cooler
Asus P8P67 LE motherboard
4GB DDR3 RAM @ 1600MHz
AMD Radeon HD5670
Corsair Force GT 180GB
Corsair Force 3 120GB
Corsair Force GT 120GB
OCZ Vertex 2 120GB
Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB


Software used:

Microsoft® Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1
ATTO disk Benchmark
CrystalMark 3.0 x64
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
IOMeter
SiSoft Sandra
AS SSD
Mathworks Matlab
Autodesk AutoCAD 2012


To ensure the repeatability of the drive’s performance and verify our results, each benchmark was repeated three times and the median result is being displayed in this review.

Editor’s note: For the Force GT drive to achieve its maximum performance, it needs to be connected to a SATA-3 port. Connecting the drive to a SATA-2 port will have a considerable negative impact on its performance.

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In this test we have created three file folder copy scenarios and we are copying them between two folders within the drive, recording the time taken for the file transfer to be completed. Our first folder is filled with 870 picture files totaling 1GB, the second folder is filled with 550 MP3 files totaling 2GB and the third folder is home to a single 4.5GB ISO file.

The Force GT 180GB actually did perform a little better than its slightly older 120GB counterpart, albeit by less than a second. It also closed the performance gap with the Force 3 series drive, which displayed exceptional potential when handling numerous small files even though it retails at a considerably lower price.



In our second real world test we are recording the time taken for our OS to fully boot from when we pressed the power on button and the start up times of two very popular and heavy professional applications, the Autodesk AutoCAD 2012 and the Mathworks Matlab. These tests are excellent examples of how an actual system would start and work under real-life circumstances.

During these tests the 180GB Force GT drive displayed similar performance to other drives using the same controller, with any differences being virtually insignificant; however it manages to break the 25 second barrier for a Windows 7 boot, which is the fastest time we have encountered to date from a single drive.

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ATTO Disk Benchmark is an old and simple but still very popular synthetic benchmark used to test the maximum theoretical speed of any storage devices, from RAID controllers and host adapters to HDD and SSD drives.

Much like Corsair advertises, the 180GB version of the Force GT drive displayed similar read but mentionable better write performance than its 120GB counterpart. Despite using the same controller, it also manages to pull ahead by 3-10% from the cheaper Force 3 series drive.



CrystalMark 3.0 x64 is another simple but popular synthetic benchmark used to measure the maximum theoretical speed of hard disk and solid state drives.

The 0x00 fill mode (compressible) mode of the test confirms the test results we received from the ATTO benchmark, with the Force GT 180GB pulling ahead even more. When using uncompressible data the write performance of the Corsair Force GT drives almost halves but the read performance remains almost unchanged.

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AS SSD is a free piece of software designed to benchmark the performance of SSD drives. It performs two sequential and two random read and write tests and then issues a score.

AS SSD is a benchmark designed for benchmarking SSD drives, which explains the very bad score of the HDD drive in this test. In this benchmark the Force GT 180GB drive did display a slight performance improvement, which however is very insignificant.



Black Magic Design make a number of industry leading video capture cards, including those which can capture HD material at very high data rates. As a result having a disk with a fast write speed is essential. To aid users in configuring their system for optimal captures Black Magic includes a utility with their hardware which records the real world disk speed and gives the maximum possible framerate for that speed.

In this test, raw read and write performance is all that matters and the Force GT 180GB drive has plenty of it; the drive’s write performance was significantly better than that of any other drive tested, including the smaller 120GB version drive from the same series, giving us the highest frame rates we have seen up to this day.

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IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems, originally developed by Intel Corporation who ultimately discontinued their work on the software which today is a free and open source application.

Solid state drives do not suffer from long access times like mechanical drives do, which is why they can easily dominate in an I/O measurement benchmark. Using the default configuration the Force GT 180GB drive reached 7702 I/Os per second, a result higher but close to that of the other SSD drives. In order to reach Corsair’s advertised 85K I/Os, one need to set up the software to perform a 4K aligned test run as described here.



SiSoft Sandra is a very popular software suite which can also be used as a synthetic all-around benchmarking tool. We are using two of the suite’s tests in our article, the File Systems benchmark and the Physical Disks Benchmark.

In this test once again raw read and write performance is all that matters, since SiSoft Sandra is a synthetic benchmark. Once again the 180GB version of the Force GT drive displayed a minor performance improvement over its smaller version, mainly during the File Systems test.

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We perform our power consumption test by installing two digital USB multimeters working as ammeters on the +5V and +12V power lines connected to the drives, checking their current drain at idle and while stressed.

Strangely, the Force GT 180GB drive displayed different power consumption characteristics when compared to the rest of the drives using the same controller; the drive consumes slightly more power while idling but significantly less power under stress.

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Even if only slightly more so, Corsair managed to make the fastest 2.5” SATA SSD drive available even faster. The performance difference over the smaller 120GB model may be slight, which was to be expected from a drive using the exact same controller and belonging to the same series, but it certainly is measurable. The Force GT 180GB drive demonstrated speeds reaching over 560MB/s read and 525MB/s write in some of our synthetic benchmarks, plus it managed to create a duplicate copy of a 4.5GB file at a speed higher than 107MB/s. It also set the record for our fastest Windows 7 boot time with a time less than 25 seconds, even though the difference compared to the other Sandforce SF-2281 controller based drives is hardly a second.

The Force GT 180GB drive is not a very cheap product but it is sensibly priced and retailing for about 319$ USD (410$ SGD) at the time of this review, a price on par with the class and capacity of the device, making it a very reasonable choice for a blazing fast OS/everyday drive. 180GB should be plenty for the OS and the installed applications/games for most users at this point of time. It would also be an amazing performance upgrade for any laptop, where the Force GT will demonstrate speeds tenfold faster than those any common 2.5” mechanical drive can ever hope to achieve. The three year long warranty is identical to that of most mechanical drives, which increases the value of the product even further and provides the consumer with an enhanced sense of security and ease of mind.