G. Skill Titan 256GB SSD Review

Real World Performance

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.


The time it takes to completely boot up and load XP is getting shorter and shorter as we progress into these reviews. Too bad this revolution is coming just as it becomes EOL. As for the Titan, 42 seconds to load XP is the best we have seen and it is glaringly obvious, real world tests like this play to its strengths and not its weaknesses. More importantly it really does highlight how inaccurate a picture even the best synthetic tests can give.


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. Lets see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!


As we saw with the boot times, the Titan simply eats everything (including the X25) for lunch. For day to day tasks….like booting up your system or loading applications the Titan is the best you can get. The Intel X25 may rule the synthetic arena but it looks like the Titan is going to dominate at least a good portion of the real world; and we will take real world performance over theoretical performance any day!