G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD Review

IOMETER

IOMeter is heavily weighted towards the server end of things, and since we here at HWC are more End User centric we will be setting and judging the results of IOMeter a little bit differently than most. To test each drive we ran 5 test runs per HDD (1,4,16,64,128 que depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 8 subparts were set to run 100% random, 80% read 20% write; testing 512b, 1k, 2k,4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reporst each of the 8 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 8. This gives us an average score for that particular que depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.

Please note: It would be foolish to even try to run IOMeter via USB. We can all agree that its numbers would be minimally exceptional at best. As such we are not subjecting this drive to this or any OS related tests while in USB mode.


While you can’t consider these scores anything other than great, the Intel X-25M is still the IOMeter champ; albeit the Falcon does give it a run for its money! Up until the SSD revolution you would have had to spend a boat load of money to get this level of performance and you certainly wouldn’t have got it from a single drive.

IOMeter Stutter Test

In our usual IOMeter test we are trying to replicate real world use where reads severely outnumber writes. However, to get a good handle on how well a Solid State Disk Drive will handle a worse case scenario (and thus how likely the dreaded stutter issue will happen) we have also run an additional test. This test is made of 1 section at que depth of 1. In this test we ran 100% random. 100% writes of 4k size chunks of information. In the .csv file we then found the Maximum Write Response Time. This in ms is worst example of how long a given operation took to complete. We consider anything higher than 333ms (one third of a second) to be a good indicator that stuttering may happen, with the higher the number the worse the duration of the stutter will most likely be.


While the average is higher than the Intel X-25M its still in the realm of exceptional AND to us the ultra low max latency of just over .1 of a second easily makes this SSD the better drive when compared to the Intel X-25M. To us we rather have a number slightly higher which is still so fast as to be unnoticeable if it means the worst case scenario will be 3 times shorter in duration which IS noticeable in length to us slow poke humans.