G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD Review

Results Analysis

Considering the Falcon is practically identical to the OCZ Vertex, we’re not surprised to find it’s an extremely capable SSD. The two drives sport the same drive controller, cache, MLC NAND Flash memory, PCB designs and even firmware, with the only difference being the way each manufacturer goes about flashing the drive’s firmware. As such, the Falcon has proven to be a stormer when it comes to performance, impressing us just as much as its illegitimate sibling, the OCZ Vertex, first did.

While theoretical performance is excellent, with average read speeds that, for once, are almost identical to the drive’s quoted maximum speeds, it’s once again our real world tests that show just how much faster an SSD is. Sequential write, read and copy speeds are fantastic, with the Falcon close to top in every test and especially impressive when reading our 1.6GB ISO file pattern, taking just 7.3 seconds to complete the task that takes a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB more than twice as long!

Iometer test show us again the huge difference that’s been brought by the inclusion on an onboard cache and the switch to an ARM processor drive controller, as the Falcon stormed through with excellent performance throughout. This is particularly noticeable when looking at random read speeds, with the Indilinx drive controller sitting on top of the pile by a wide margin. Random write speeds and latencies are both very good too, and ensure that the Falcon won’t suffer at all from the stuttering issues that we’re now so wary for.

Looking to real world applications the Falcon eats up the competition when booting Windows Vista 64 Bit Home Premium, taking just 24 seconds to boot from cold to a fully loaded desktop. That’s more than twice as fast as a 1TB mechanical HDD and really underlines the difference in measurable speed between an SSD and an HDD in everyday tasks. This is confirmed by the Falcon’s similarly quick Crysis level load time of 30 seconds, a full seven seconds faster than performance 1TB HDDs.


However, while you can look at the numbers we’ve collected here, it’s tough to truly appreciate how much an SSD can improve your PC experience without trying it firsthand. You immediately notice how much more responsive your system is; programs load near instantly with no latency between double clicking the icon and the application opening, browsing through folders is made so much easier by the far superior random read speeds of an SSD, preview thumbnails of videos and photos populate much, much faster.

It’s hard to describe just how much a difference it makes, but it’s certainly comparable to making the jump from dial-up internet access to broadband. You’ve gotten used to the performance of HDDs, and once you’ve had your first taste of using a PC with an SSD, going back is like swimming through treacle.

Staying in TRIM

While the performance is fantastic, SSDs are still a developing product and as such support is an important issue to take into consideration. To its credit G.Skill has been fairly active in supporting its SSD customers, quickly rolling out new firmware when it’s released by Indilinx, offering a version of wiper.exe for use with its drives and answering user’s questions and support queries via a dedicated English speaking forum.

However, from our experience though, the level and depth of support offered by G.SKill online is a shadow of that offered by OCZ, with OCZ's SSD forum having grown over time to an industry leading, monstrous size, and offering clear concise instructions for all kinds of drive maintenance regardless of operating system or platform. In comparison, quite frankly the posts from G.Skill on it's support forum vary wildly in quality and clarity.

The Wiper.exe application offered by both partners goes some way towards fixing the problem of gradual performance degradation of an SSD, when cells of data on the drive become partially filled with deleted files. When the drive comes to rewrite these cells it then needs off load the valid data from the cell onto the cache, remove the deleted files, rewrite the original data and then write the new data. This process takes time and is the main cause of performance degradation in the latest generation of SSDs.

Wiper.exe performs a basic defragmentation of the drive, clearing deleted information in bulk and restoring much of a drive’s degraded performance. While it’s not quite a full TRIM command (included in Windows 7 but not yet supported by Indilinx’s drives) it can go a long way towards restoring a heavily used Falcon or Vertex to its original performance.