G. Skill Titan 256GB SSD Review

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.

While most OS drives spend most of their times reading and not writing, the write speed of the drive does have a big impact on the stutter issue and how fast the drive feels.


These numbers are decent, but not great. It is unfortunate that this generation of Samsung based MLC drives is not as fast at writes as the previous generation (e.g. the Warp v2). On the positive side, the majority of write speeds were all above 50MB/s with only 5 quick dips below this (with the worst being 16.8). These spots are prime candidates for stuttering and / or early death…but we have to wonder if it is the NAND chips or the controller which is at fault. It seems that along with all the positives associated with RAID 0 we are going to see the negatives as well.

In a proper setup the RAID controller is not only powerful enough to handle the overhead associated with RAID stripes but is backed up by onboard cache. This is why dedicated RAID boards have their own fast CPU and their own memory. Neither is the case with this JMicron controller (as it appears to be anything but fast and powerful) and its write performance is negatively effected by it. However, with all but a few spots being above 50MB/s we are impressed with the increase on the bottom end of its performance; heck we will take average write speeds of 80s over 90s any day….as long as the majority of low ends are all greater than 50MB/s and not 20MB/s. In the real world this generation of drives should “feel” a lot faster because of its improved bottom end; and more importantly it should have a lot less stutters because of this. To us this makes these write numbers one for the win column.