G.Skill Falcon II 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 reports 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 queue depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.


At all que depths this drive is slower than the original Falcon SSD (or any Indilinx SSd for that matter). At deeper que depths the difference is small, but at lighter que depths the difference is significant. This was expected, what was not expected was the fact that the Falcon II did as good as it did. It looks like the fact that G.Skill / Indilinx opted for 34nm chips does help counteract the fact that it is more mid grade NAND and if this is the case….we can just imagine how good a Vertex / Falcon / Torqx with high end 34nm-based chips would do!

IOMeter Stutter Test

In our usual IOMeter test we are trying to replicate real world use where reads severly 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 both the average and max stutter is worse than the original Falcon these numbers are still very good and way below anything we would consider worrisome. Stuttering really was only an issue with the older JMicron controllers.