discussion G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD Review

[AkG]

ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.

Read

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While really, really good the Falcon does not have as nice a power curve as the Intel. This bad boy is good but it takes awhile for all its power to come on line so to speak. Interestingly enough it is the first drive to best not only the dual JM601 controller SSD but also Intel in the large file reads. One thing worthy of notice is G.Skill have been extremely conservative in the specifications of this drive. They state it max read is “only” 230MB/s but this drive easily exceeds this by nearly 30MB/s.


Write

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Now this is more like it! While it does still lose in ultra small chunks, the Falcon quickly gets its act together and overtakes the X-25M and then later overtakes everyone with numbers which are down right grin worthy, albeit not as high as G.Skill claims…but really what is a theoretical 12’ish MB/s in the grand scheme of things when you get into ranges this high?

 

[AkG]

IOMETER / IOMeter Stutter Test

IOMETER

IOMeter is heavily weighted towards the server end of things, and since we here at HWC are more End User centric we will be setting and judging the results of IOMeter a little bit differently than most. To test each drive we ran 5 test runs per HDD (1,4,16,64,128 que depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 8 subparts were set to run 100% random, 80% read 20% write; testing 512b, 1k, 2k,4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reporst each of the 8 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 8. This gives us an average score for that particular que depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.

Please note: It would be foolish to even try to run IOMeter via USB. We can all agree that its numbers would be minimally exceptional at best. As such we are not subjecting this drive to this or any OS related tests while in USB mode.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Falcon128/GSKILL_FALCON_IOM.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
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While you can’t consider these scores anything other than great, the Intel X-25M is still the IOMeter champ; albeit the Falcon does give it a run for its money! Up until the SSD revolution you would have had to spend a boat load of money to get this level of performance and you certainly wouldn’t have got it from a single drive.

IOMeter Stutter Test

In our usual IOMeter test we are trying to replicate real world use where reads severely outnumber writes. However, to get a good handle on how well a Solid State Disk Drive will handle a worse case scenario (and thus how likely the dreaded stutter issue will happen) we have also run an additional test. This test is made of 1 section at que depth of 1. In this test we ran 100% random. 100% writes of 4k size chunks of information. In the .csv file we then found the Maximum Write Response Time. This in ms is worst example of how long a given operation took to complete. We consider anything higher than 333ms (one third of a second) to be a good indicator that stuttering may happen, with the higher the number the worse the duration of the stutter will most likely be.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Falcon128/GSKILL_FALCON_stutter.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
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While the average is higher than the Intel X-25M its still in the realm of exceptional AND to us the ultra low max latency of just over .1 of a second easily makes this SSD the better drive when compared to the Intel X-25M. To us we rather have a number slightly higher which is still so fast as to be unnoticeable if it means the worst case scenario will be 3 times shorter in duration which IS noticeable in length to us slow poke humans.

 

[AkG]

XP Start Up / Adobe CS3

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps!” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Falcon128/GSKILL_FALCON_boot.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
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At 39 seconds this drive simply destroys the competition. Even its closest competition is 2 seconds slower and even the mighty X-25 is a massive 7 seconds slower! This is a significant difference and one that you WILL notice in the real world. If you are swapping over from spindle based drives to the Falcon….expect your world to be rocked…and rocked hard.

ADOBE CS3 LOAD TIME

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Falcon128/GSKILL_FALCON_adobe.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
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As with boot times, the Indilinx controller’s mixture of read and write performance makes it the undisputed champ of the Adobe Crucible of pain! Once again 2 seconds may not seem like a lot of difference but if you use Adobe as much as some people do….those two seconds will add up pretty quick.

 

[AkG]

Real World Data Transfers

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containg 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Falcon128/GSKILL_FALCON_copy_big.jpg" border="0" alt="" />

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Falcon128/GSKILL_FALCON_copy_small.jpg" border="0" alt="" />

<img src="http://images.hardwarecanucks.com/image/akg/Storage/Falcon128/GSKILL_FALCON_copy_self.jpg" border="0" alt="" />
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Except for one zinger in the copy to itself test the Falcon and X-25M trade blows like two heavy weight prize fighters with a grudge. These numbers are just too close to call, even with the blow out win by the X-25M we mentioned, the Falcon also did destroy the X-25M in small files to copy to itself test. To us this flip flopping from one extreme to the other highlights the power of the controller and its biggest weakness. All in all we will take a SSD with superior small file handling capabilities over a large file winner and leave data storage to spindle drives (drives which excel at that type of thing!).

 

[AkG]

Real World Stutters / Value

Real World Stutters

Over a three day period we used the SSD as our main OS drive. During this period we did everything in our power to make the drive stutter. This is what we found out.

As with the Intel-X25M…the Falcon just does not stutter. You can however overload the drive, but just like a regular drive your system just becomes slow but will not freeze up like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck. Of course, if you pile on enough past this point it will then stutter but this is way, way past the point even a HDD would start to complain!

In a nut shell you really don’t need to do any OS tweaking to get phenomenal performance from this drive; nor worry about the dreaded stutter issue. We of course recommend turning off defrag and the ilk but that is just common sense “care and handling” of any SSD more than tweaking for acceptable user experience. If you do go whole hog and either use MFT (or just diskpar to align the partition instead of replacing it) you will be rewarded with increased performance; but after a certain point “faster” becomes less and less discernible and the time (and possible monetary investment) required to do such tweaks does quickly hit the point of diminishing returns.

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of this review.

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At $2.77 per GB this drive is not exactly cheap; however when you consider its performance levels are only rivaled by the X-25M (a drive which costs twice as much per GB!) the value of the Falcon does improve significantly. As with all things cutting edge related, if the bottom line is you main concern then this is not the toy for you. If you consider time to equals money, then maybe this drive is right up you alley. For everyone else we think it’s a very, very good value and a relatively cheap way to get top notch performance at a greatly reduced price.

 

[AkG]

Conclusion

Conclusion

Well what can you say but "wow"? We were (and still are) a big fan of the G.Skill Titan but in every possible way the Falcon outclasses it. It’s “no ifs and nor buts” faster, more agile and more fun to use than the Titan it supersedes as G. Skill’s high end SSD. The last reason is the big sea of change for us because when all is said and done the main reason for spending money for above and beyond “good enough” is not for the sometimes moderate increase in performance but for the fun factor. Maybe it’s just us but having a drive which literally smokes anything else out there, and doing so on a regular basis IS a big reason why we do what we do.

Don’t get us wrong the Falcon is not just fun to use, but really is one of the few SSDs which are truly drop-in replacements for a standard hard drive. You don’t need to do any tweaking to get the best from it, to borrow a quote from Stevie J “It just works” and quite honestly after a while (when the fun factor wears off like the damnable drug it is) you can actually forget about it and get on USING your system instead of worrying about stutters and whatnot. Heck, its one of the very few pieces of bleeding edge kit we have used which does not act like a spoiled Prima Dona. You don’t need to baby and coax it along to keep getting the best from it. You don’t need to do anything but run a painless program every once in awhile. Actually, when you think about it the wiper.exe / TRIM function does its job a heck of lot faster than your favorite defragmentation programs it replaces so it can actually be considered a time saver.

The only possible sticking point with this drive is price. Its not cheap, at least the iterations with enough storage are not cheap. This tech technology is still much more expensive than any mega sized 7200rpm (10K) 2.5” HDD out there, so some may argue it’s not a great value for everyone. We personally think 128GB is more than enough for most people….right now (no guarantees about tomorrow) and while costly, it’s still not that much more than a VelociRaptor, which it eats for lunch and craps out WD 640GB Black Editions. In the end it really all depends on what you consider “expensive”.

For the enthusiast community we consider the G.Skill Falcon 128GB to be a very, very good deal when compared to the Intel X-25M, and it is cheaper than other cutting edge “enthusiast SSDs” out there. So, while our judgment may be controversial we think the best thing we can say about this drive is it is a Dam Good Value. It may not be for everyone, but everyone who pulls the trigger on it WILL like it.


Pros
- FAST
- Stutter Free
- TRIM capable
- Firmware updateable
- Relatively inexpensive
- Preloaded with TRIM capable firmware


Cons
- Intel X-25M still beats it in a few areas
- While “relatively inexpensive” its still NOT cheap
- “Falcon”?! Should have been called Hayabusa (aka Peregrine Falcon) or Fighting Falcon or something equally grunt worthy!

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