G.Skill Falcon II 128GB SSD Review

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.


As expected there IS a noticeable difference between this drive an the orginal Falcon, but its numbers are still very good. This works out to be less than the 10% performance difference we expected but this is most likely due to the fact that our error tolerances are not exactly in the millisecond range with these real world tests. More importantly, and in the grand scheme of things, 3 seconds difference between a flagship model and a mid tier solution is down right impressive.

Adobe CS3 Load Time

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!


With a two second gap between these two units this once again works out to well below 10% of a difference. It seems that once again synthetic tests have painted not only a schizophrenic but incomplete picture of what true capabilities the Falcon II has to offer. We can honestly say that we are starting to like this drive more and more but let’s withhold judgment until the data transfer tests and value sections results are in.