G. Skill Titan 256GB SSD Review

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read


Judging from the above numbers, this SSD loves larger chunks of data. It would appear that its controllers do add a certain amount of overhead to the scenario. This is not overly surprising and we will be taking a closer look at this when we get to the ATTO and IOMeter results. In the mean time, all three sets of numbers will eat any spindle based drive for lunch, and 14+ MB/s on 4K chunks is still impressive.


Write


As we saw with the read speed test, the small 4k test is handicapped by the RAID 0 controller and dual JM602 setup, but it still better than older Samsung based MLC and SLC drives and any improvement is a good thing.


Random Access Time

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive’s memory can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use “h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test” for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamut of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used “h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest”. This tells the program to write all results in English, save them in drivetest txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).


Our hunch about the RAID's pros and cons rearing their ugly heads does seem to have some merit. Now don’t get us wrong, 0.21MS is still freaking phenomenal and anyone who says that they can tell the difference between .18 and .21MS (or even .09 and .21) in normal day to day tasks is trying to sell you something. These numbers are very, very good and when compared against an older SLC drive they are impressive; heck, when compared against a super fast 10,000rpm drive whose main claim to fame is its low latency…well the results aren’t pretty for the vRaptor.