G. Skill Titan 256GB SSD Review

Conclusion

There certainly is no denying it; the dual JMicron with a RAID controller in the Titan does improve the performance of this drive over much of the competition. In some cases the performance increase was drastic and quite impressive. However, like most things in life; there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch since we were extremely disappointed by its IOMeter results as they were simply terrible. Of course, IOMeter doesn’t like RAID 0 setups unless it’s on a powerful massive scale with loads of drives involved (like the X25 basically is).

We can spend ages talking about how the RAID controller shows its Achilles' heel every now and then but there is no denying that it does make a difference and it has a definite positive impact on the dreaded stutter issue. Unfortunately, this setup does feel a lot like a kludge….a kick ass kludge but still a kludge never the less. We are not sure how kind history is going to be to this setup, as G.Skill and Samsung once again didn’t get it all right since these drives are crying out for cache. IF the onboard RAID controller was a little bit more powerful and had 32MB (or preferably 64MB) of onboard cache this could have been an X-25 killer but a lot more expensive to boot. As it stands the Titan is one monster of an SSD, one which may be hobbled by triple JMircon controllers, but the handicap has been drastically reduced.

In the end, this drive is big, fast and powerful; and even more importantly, it really only requires a few easy to implement tweaks to reduce perceived stutters drastically. This combination is more than enough for us to in good faith give it a Dam Innovative Award for its unique take on overcoming the JMicron challenges. We also give it our Dam Good Value award due to the fact that is has over four times the capacity of a single Intel X-25M while retaining much of the more expensive drive's performance. Hopefully, Samsung (or at least G. Skill) will see the light and kick the JM602 (and JMB390) controller to the curb and put a suitably powerful controller in their future lines.


Pros:

- Great performance
- Large 256GB size
- Improved stutter handling
- Dual controllers
- Very good $/GB ratio versus other SSDs


Cons:

- Write performance still less than X-25M
- Stutter issue still exists
- Only 2 year warranty
- Increased thermal output
- Dual controllers are still JM602s