G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD Review

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containg 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.


Except for one zinger in the copy to itself test the Falcon and X-25M trade blows like two heavy weight prize fighters with a grudge. These numbers are just too close to call, even with the blow out win by the X-25M we mentioned, the Falcon also did destroy the X-25M in small files to copy to itself test. To us this flip flopping from one extreme to the other highlights the power of the controller and its biggest weakness. All in all we will take a SSD with superior small file handling capabilities over a large file winner and leave data storage to spindle drives (drives which excel at that type of thing!).