Corsair Force LS Series 240GB SSD Review

A Look Inside The Force LS

As usual, we open up the case and take a peek at the innards of the drive which voids the warranty but who needs those anyway?

Opening the drive requires the removal of four screws, two on each side rather than the back where many drives have their screws. Removing the PCB takes four more screw extractions.

The first side of the PCB house half of the flash modules found on the drive and little else.

Though not marked, the NAND used is Toshiba MLC 19nm Toggle with sixteen total on the drive for 256GB in overall capacity for this 240GB drive. Each carry part number TT57G2LAKA.

Flipping the board over, we find a similar NAND configuration and the addition of the cache and the Phison controller.

The DDR3 DRAM cache manufactured by Powerchip found on the 240GB drive is 512MB in capacity which we see here, while the smaller 60GB and 120GB drives carry a 256MB cache.

The Phison PS3108 controller is one I don’t believe we’ve had a chance to test before. We did see a Phison controller in the Crucial V4 drive but it was part number PS3105. We actually don’t have a ton of info on the 8-channel controller other than it supports SATA 6Gbps, TRIM and idle garbage collection much like nearly all other modern SSD controllers. Based on the performance, it feels a lot like the Marvell controllers but not as widespread in use. Odds are good that it’s a less expensive part than the controllers offered by SandForce and LAMD.