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

TRIM in SandForce based SSDs has always been trickier than with other SSDs due to the fact that SandForce's way to deal with data is a lot more complicated. Instead of just writing the data to the NAND as other SSDs do, SandForce employs a real-time compression and de-duplication engine. When even your basic design is a lot more complex, there is a higher chance that something will go wrong. When other SSDs receive a TRIM command, they can simply clean the blocks with invalid data and that's it. SandForce, on the other hand, has to check if the data is used by something else (i.e. thanks to de-duplication). You don't want your SSD to erase data that can be crucial to your system's stability, do you?

As we have shown in dozens of reviews, TRIM doesn't work properly when dealing with incompressible data. It never has. That means when the drive is filled and tortured with incompressible data, it's put to a state where even TRIM does not fully restore performance. Since even Intel's own proprietary firmware didn't fix this, I believe the problem is so deep in the design that there is just no way to completely fix it. However, the TRIM issue we are dealing with today has nothing to do with incompressible data: now TRIM doesn't work properly with compressible data either.