G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD Review

Good review, and tis very tempting.
One word of advice, get it from here: http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?GSK-SSD12F and save yourself £5;)

Sam

a SSD related question: how do i review the level of wear it is getting? i keep hearing people say "my daily wear is ___ and by that rate, my drive will fail in 2020"

also, can my Samsung SSD use that wipe.exe? or is it manufacturer specific like the overclocking tool by EVGA

about $3/GB...when it hits around $1.50, i might be interested personally.

Originally Posted by TFA
£2.29/GB which while still expensive, is bordering on the affordable

No, it really isn't. Unfortunately! My idea of "affordable" is £0.75 per GB (still 10 times more expensive than HDDs, mind).

Originally Posted by wuyanxu

is it manufacturer specific like the overclocking tool by EVGA

The EVGA Precision overclocking tool works on non EVGA graphics cards too ;)

Originally Posted by capnPedro

Quote:

Originally Posted by TFA
£2.29/GB which while still expensive, is bordering on the affordable

No, it really isn't. Unfortunately! My idea of "affordable" is £0.75 per GB (still 10 times more expensive than HDDs, mind).

Then you're not in the SSD market :P You can't want a Core i7 and only intend to pay for an E5200..

Do us all a favour.

Get one of these SSDs, and get a standard mechanical disk. Build two otherwise-identical systems and put XP on them. Set things up so that they continuously reboot and reload XP.

Let them do this until both drives have failed, which will probably take about a year for the mech and considerably less for the flash, and then tell us what you get.

P

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Then you're not in the SSD market :P You can't want a Core i7 and only intend to pay for an E5200..

indeed.

i think some people are spoiled by HDD's low prices. i remember the days when a 2GB disk costs the same as 2TB disks. and that's less than 15 years ago.

if you want speed faster than any HDD, including Raptor, you'd have to pay for it. after switching from a Raptor, the quietness of it is amazing.

the issue of failing is only a real issue when you are a stupid user and don't apply the tweaks. move ProgramData and Users folder off C drive onto a fast application drive such as WD Black, and then disable as much logging on C as possible. and now the SSD will be both fast and reliable.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Then you're not in the SSD market :P You can't want a Core i7 and only intend to pay for an E5200..

You're very right. But it's not like SSDs are offering 10 times the performance of HDDs (random access times given, however).

28 times the price, for double the performance, and this is afordable? I don't think I want to be in the SSD market just yet, thanks.

SSDs should only be compared to the WD Raptor or velociRaptor series, all other hard drives are dead slow and useless for OS drives.

compare 64GB Samsung on Novatech for £87 against their £55 74GB WD Raptor. i'd say the SSD is a much better buy at those prices.
-0.74 £/GB on Raptor
-1.36 £/GB on Samsung

came from Raptor, the Raptor is loud and not as fast as the SSD, only good point is that it's very, very reliable when you don't plan to move your computer. SSD on the other hand is ultra reliable when you are moving your rig, but most importantly everything feels instant and you don't feel the program is being launched from the disk, it feels as though it came from RAM because the lack of drive seaking.

for double the price, you get almost double the performance.

Originally Posted by wuyanxu
for double the price, you get almost double the performance.

Or more if you look at the Iometer random combined r+w results (which in my opinion is the one that represents the felt performance gain the best).

Anyway, lower prices and higher capacity would still be nice, but do I regret buying a SSD at the current prices? not one bit.

I wish they would bring out a 32GB version of this, just so that I can use it as an OS drive :(

Originally Posted by Phil Rhodes
and put XP on them.

What's XP?

Originally Posted by capnPedro
You're very right. But it's not like SSDs are offering 10 times the performance of HDDs (random access times given, however).

28 times the price, for double the performance, and this is afordable? I don't think I want to be in the SSD market just yet, thanks.

Look at graphics upgrades then - twice the performance for x the price if we look between generations?

You're also looking at total capacity too - you dont buy a 1TB drive for your OS then fill it all! Nor do you with and SSD. You cant compare mass storage with performance storage.

Originally Posted by wuyanxu
a SSD related question: how do i review the level of wear it is getting? i keep hearing people say "my daily wear is ___ and by that rate, my drive will fail in 2020"

also, can my Samsung SSD use that wipe.exe? or is it manufacturer specific like the overclocking tool by EVGA

Tough to measure SSD wearing. I'll be hopefully doing some research into SSD wearing and performance degradation soon to clear some of this up.

Sadly wiper.exe is specific to the particular manufactuerers drives, (or rather who the drive thinks manufactuered it ;) ). Sasmung has yet to release such an application i'm affaid.

Originally Posted by Phil Rhodes
Do us all a favour.

Get one of these SSDs, and get a standard mechanical disk. Build two otherwise-identical systems and put XP on them. Set things up so that they continuously reboot and reload XP.

P

Because we all use an 8 year old OS rebooting thousands of times a day with a £300 performance part designed for modern operating systems? I think we should also throw in some Windows 98, 95 and even 3.1 testing too just for people to see the improvement an SSD will bring to that '96 Packard Bell.

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi

Quote:

Originally Posted by Phil Rhodes
and put XP on them.

What's XP?

BEST OS EVOR!1!!111

Still think these SSD drives are daft price wise :X

last page, 4th paragraph

erase the data from you’re "Falcon" every time

should be

erase the data from your "Falcon" every time

;)


Oh, and you so should install win95 on an SSD just to see what happens...

Originally Posted by wuyanxu
SSDs should only be compared to the WD Raptor or velociRaptor series, all other hard drives are dead slow and useless for OS drives.

compare 64GB Samsung on Novatech for £87 against their £55 74GB WD Raptor. i'd say the SSD is a much better buy at those prices.
-0.74 £/GB on Raptor
-1.36 £/GB on Samsung

Originally Posted by Bindibadgi
Look at graphics upgrades then - twice the performance for x the price if we look between generations?

You're also looking at total capacity too - you dont buy a 1TB drive for your OS then fill it all! Nor do you with and SSD. You cant compare mass storage with performance storage.

OK I see what you mean now. I've never looked at it that way I guess because I've never had performance storage and mass storage! At the moment, I have my OS on a partition on a 1TB Barracuda 7200.11.

Next upgrade (after uni :( ) will have an SSD, definately, and probably a couple of 5TB drives in RAID.

Originally Posted by wuyanxu
all other hard drives are dead slow and useless for OS drives.

Oh, how did we ever get along without our savior, the SSD?!

/sarcasm

Originally Posted by wuyanxu
but most importantly everything feels instant and you don't feel the program is being launched from the disk, it feels as though it came from RAM because the lack of drive seaking.

Y'know, superfetch does much the same thing for me in Vista =P

Because we all use an 8 year old OS rebooting thousands of times a day with a £300 performance part designed for modern operating systems? I think we should also throw in some Windows 98, 95 and even 3.1 testing too just for people to see the improvement an SSD will bring to that '96 Packard Bell.

The point is not what OS you use. Use Vista if MS are paying you to vocally support the steaming pile of...

The point is how much less long lived the flash is than the hard disk. I don't know how much less good it'll be, but I suspect it'll be less good. Possibly so much less good that it's questionably usable.

P

Phil, point to an example of how it is bad. I'm curious.

Originally Posted by Phil Rhodes

Quote:

Because we all use an 8 year old OS rebooting thousands of times a day with a £300 performance part designed for modern operating systems? I think we should also throw in some Windows 98, 95 and even 3.1 testing too just for people to see the improvement an SSD will bring to that '96 Packard Bell.

The point is not what OS you use. Use Vista if MS are paying you to vocally support the steaming pile of...

The point is how much less long lived the flash is than the hard disk. I don't know how much less good it'll be, but I suspect it'll be less good. Possibly so much less good that it's questionably usable.

P

Don't be hatin' on Vista, it's not as bad any everyone gives it stick for. And Microsoft don't pay me to say that.

Considering the average MLC SSD rewrite endurance is anywhere between 1000 -10,000 cycles, I'm personally not too worried. Even worst case, that'd mean I'd have to write 128TB of data to the drive over it's lifetime, something that realistically just won't happen in a home user, or arguably even an enterprise environment. These drives also come with specific wear levelling algorithms on the drive controller to avoid over using a specific cell of the drive repeatedly, so you'll see fairly even wear too. Even then, wear isn't going to influence performance too much (until you hit the write endurance of course) - it's the defragmentation caused by partially filled cells that causes performance drops, - something Wiper.exe and hopefully TRIM support can happily resolve

Originally Posted by Goty

Quote:

Originally Posted by wuyanxu
but most importantly everything feels instant and you don't feel the program is being launched from the disk, it feels as though it came from RAM because the lack of drive seaking.

Y'know, superfetch does much the same thing for me in Vista =P

Trust me, using an SSD an an OS using superfetch are nothing alike. Superfetch might pre-load the program files of some apps and titles but it won't help when booting, loading larger apps or when browsing your system. A decent SSD really is a huge step up in performance - I promise!

Apparently OCZ have will have native Win7 TRIM support on the Vertex soon. :)

But I'm interested in this whole cross-flashing hijinks you mention. Is it possible to flash back to G.Skill FW if things go wrong?