G. Skill Titan 256GB SSD Review

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.

It really is hard to make the Titan stutter, and we had to work at it to get it to stutter enough to be considered anything more than “a meaningful pause” length of time. You really need to work at and copy a bunch of large and small files from the drive to itself (all at the same time), do a virus scan, watch a couple of Youtube videos…etc…etc before this drive will get something which has some semblance to the hiccups. To reduce these problems we first turned off Indexing, PreFetch / SuperFetch, short file names, disabled timestamp for last access of files, re enabled write caching on the disk, moved the page file to another drive, and couple of other minor tweaks. This took care of all but a few of the stutters and reduced those stutter times significantly. Unless you really, really want to get the absolute best from this drive, this amount of tweaking will probably be enough for most users to be completely satisfied. However, stuttering did occasionally still happen (though it acted more like an overworked spindle drive in that everything first got real slooooow and was only after we kept pushing it did long stutters start to appear).

In order to really get rid of them and squeeze out the last drop of performance we had to get out the big guns and aligned the partition for optimized 4k sector allocation with a 128 sector offset (though we too agree that a 256 sector offset may net even better results with these RAID 0 drives). This was accomplished via Diskpar and if you are interested in doing this major tweak there is a great guide floating around on an certain forum which we can PM you if you so wish. If you are running Vista you can actually use the Recovery Disk to accomplish this (with Diskpar) but we did it the old fashioned way: setting the system up to temporarily use another drive as the OS drive and has this Drive as the Slave; followed by doing an old fashioned fresh install (without destroying the partition). Doing this resulted in a stutter free environment, one which was bloody damn quick.

Extended Runtime Testing

Where these units are marketed towards the home user and laptop environment, it is reasonable to expect them to be able to handle moderate usage, with random reads and writes of various sizes. To test how robust this unit is, and how well it can take handle a marathon stress test, the G.Skill was subjected to a 20hr torture session. During this time IOMeter was setup to run for 20 hours using various size tests all with completely random read/write scenarios. All temperature readings are taken directly from the hottest part of the drive case using a Digital Infrared Thermometer. The infrared thermometer used has a 9 to 1 ratio, meaning that at 9cm it takes it reading from a 1 square cm. To obtain the numbers used in this review the thermometer was held approximately 3cm away from the heatsink and only the hottest number obtained was used.

During this testing the drive got hot, not overly hot but hot enough to be noticeable. At the end of the day it got about 24° C above ambient, and to say that we were shocked is an understatement. The extra controller and raid controller really do add to the thermal envelope of this bad boy.

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.


It seems that the shear size of this drive really does help not only its performance numbers but it's value as well. G.Skill really has aggressively priced thd Titan and we have a feeling its going to pay off in spades for them. Bravo G.Skill for not trying to bleed your customers dry in return for giving them their bleeding edge fix.