G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD Review

Test Setup

Testing hard disks can be difficult, especially when using such a hard disk intensive operative system as Windows Vista 64-bit - give it thirty seconds and it'll spin your hard drives up to defragment or index them - not exactly what we want when trying to ascertain a hard drive's peak performance.

To get a decent idea of drive performance in a variety of real world circumstances we test using a variety of tools. HDTach 3.040 gives us a good idea of theoretical drive performance, FC-Test’s intensive file transfer abilities give us a good idea of real world drive performance, and our GIMP image editing benchmark should expose any problems in the disk controller being unable to keep up with read/write instructions - something cheaper SSDs are prone to.

We've also now chosen to now include random read and write performance figures following requests from our forum members. Older SSDs have suffered particularly in random write latency department, leading to the infamous "stuttering" effect as the disk lags. While we've been unable to retest every drive and SSD that we've covered in the last nine months, we've made an effort to include the major players and more popular drives.

Finally, we test hard disks in genuine real world circumstances, cloning an install of Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit onto the drive and then timing the resulting clean boot time before also timing Crysis level load times.

Each test was performed five times with the highest and lowest scores discarded and the remaining three results averaged.

Common Components

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 (operating at 3.00GHz – 9x333MHz)
  
• Gigabyte GA-X38-DS5 motherboard (Intel X38 Express with ICH9R southbridge)
  
• 2x 1GB OCZ FlexXLC PC-6400 memory (operating in dual-channel at DDR2-800 with 5-5-5-15-2T timings)
  
• ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB
  
• PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750W PSU
  
• Windows Vista Home Premium x86-64
  
• Intel inf 8.3.0 WHQL
  
• ATI Catalyst 8.11 WHQL.