G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD Review

Interior Impressions

Before we continue: Please remember that opening any SSD will effectively void your warranty.


To open the Falcon up you have to remove four screws, which is par for the course; what is unusual is we had to remove not one but TWO “warranty void” warning stickers to get at the screws. We honestly don’t think anyone will ever mistakenly take apart a Falcon with this kind of obvious warnings. While this was interesting in an annoying way, it did cross over into the surreal when we spotted a THIRD warning label…inside the case.

On first glance at the board, one could easily be excused for thinking this was another Titan clone (I.E. dual JM controllers). Its only when you take a close look to do you realize that one of the chips is the Barefoot controller and the other is the Ram chip.


Other than this Ram and Controller tweak this board looks a lot like any other board out there. At one end you have the data and power ports (and the ingenious jumper pins), then the RAM and Barefoot controller in from it followed by your typical double row of flash chips, with another double row of 4 on the other side. In grand total you have 16
flash chips, one DRAM chip and one Indilinx Barefoot controller chip.


The I/O controller chip is (as expected) none other than the Indilinx “Barefoot” IDX110 controller. The Indilinx IDX110 is an ARM based controller with native SATA 3.0Gb/s, supports capacities of up to 512GB (vs. 256 for the FC version) and is rated for speeds of 230MB/Sec read and 190MB/s writes. Also and just as importantly, unlike the JM line of controllers this bad boy also supports up to 64MB of RAM for stutter free operation. On paper this is certainly a potent brew and we are itching to see how it fares in the both the synthetic and real world tests!

This controller really is the secret sauce that makes the Falcon so darn unique; and in an interesting twist this is the Indilinx IDX110M00-LC (with emphasis on the LC) and not the older -FC found in previous competitors Barefoot SSD. To put this another way this is the brand new version of the IDX110 “barefoot” controller which has up until now only been seen in the uber expensive Vertex EX line. We have a feeling that the FCs have been phased out and all new Barefoot based SSD will also have this revision. In any case it was a nice little surprise and bonus.


The Ram which helps the Barefoot go stutter free is made by Elpida. To be specific this single 64MB SDRAM chip is S51321CBH-6DTT-F, though the actual Elpida part number is the EDS51321CBH-M-F (but we assume this was too much to fit on this little chip). This ram chip is rated to run at 166MHZ at CL3 and is rated for an operating temperature range of 20°C to 85°C.


The MLC NAND chips used in the Falcon are Samsung K9HCG08U1M-PCB0 units. Once again, using the online Samsung model decoder we can see these chips are 48 pin 3bit MLC Quad Die Package, 1st gen lead free (ROHS compliant), 2.7V ~ 3.6V, 25 nanosecond NAND chips which operate with Dual nCE (Dual Chip Enable control) & Dual R/nB (Dual Ready/Busy Output). This model is rated at a density of 64Gbits or 8GB per chip and for temperatures for 0° to 70°C. Above the model number (and as stated earlier) we can see these were made in the 10th week of 2009 and below it we can see the batch number “YC84A1XX” (or at least what we assume is the batch number but is describe by Samsung vaguely as “Customer List Reference” only).