G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD Review

Real World Stutters

Over a three day period we used the SSD as our main OS drive. During this period we did everything in our power to make the drive stutter. This is what we found out.

As with the Intel-X25M…the Falcon just does not stutter. You can however overload the drive, but just like a regular drive your system just becomes slow but will not freeze up like a deer in the headlights of an oncoming Mack truck. Of course, if you pile on enough past this point it will then stutter but this is way, way past the point even a HDD would start to complain!

In a nut shell you really don’t need to do any OS tweaking to get phenomenal performance from this drive; nor worry about the dreaded stutter issue. We of course recommend turning off defrag and the ilk but that is just common sense “care and handling” of any SSD more than tweaking for acceptable user experience. If you do go whole hog and either use MFT (or just diskpar to align the partition instead of replacing it) you will be rewarded with increased performance; but after a certain point “faster” becomes less and less discernible and the time (and possible monetary investment) required to do such tweaks does quickly hit the point of diminishing returns.

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of this review.


At $2.77 per GB this drive is not exactly cheap; however when you consider its performance levels are only rivaled by the X-25M (a drive which costs twice as much per GB!) the value of the Falcon does improve significantly. As with all things cutting edge related, if the bottom line is you main concern then this is not the toy for you. If you consider time to equals money, then maybe this drive is right up you alley. For everyone else we think it’s a very, very good value and a relatively cheap way to get top notch performance at a greatly reduced price.