G.Skill Falcon II 128GB SSD Review

Interior Impressions

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


As expected, the PCB itself and its layout are classic Indilinx, in the usual green. All in all you get: 16 flash chips, one RAM chip and one Indilinx Barefoot controller chip….just like all their other drives. However, this drive does have a few interesting twists on the classic Indilinx setup waiting for us. Let’s start by looking at the biggest of these twists first: the Indilinx controller.


The I/O controller chip this SSD uses is referred to in the various literature as the new Indilinx “Eco” controller. As you can see in the above photo the “Eco” controller is nothing more (or less) than a new revision of the “Barefoot” IDX110 controller. Previous version were labelled IDX110M00-LC, whereas this is the IDX110M01-LC version. We are not quiet sure exactly what Indilinx changed in this revision besides its ability to support 34nm chips (and probably 32nm as well but this only speculation on our behalf). It will be interesting to see if anything else was added, tweaked or refined while they were at it.


The memory which Indilinx and/or G.Skill chose to use in this drive is made by Elpida. This was completely expected as every Indilinx SSD we have looked at in the past has used Elpida ram. However, unlike previous units the specific 64MB SDRAM chip used in this solid state drive is different. To be precise the ram on this board is the Elpida S51321DBH-5ATS-F which from all accounts is the same chip as the Vertex and other Indilinx SSDs are now shipping with and appears to have superseded the earlier EDS51321CBH-6DTT-M-F we saw on other review samples.

This lead and halogen free, 1.8V ram chip is rated to run at 166MHZ at CL3 and is rated for an operating temperature range of -20°C to 85°C.


After taking apart an OCZ Agility EX, and the fact that this uses 34nm chips we were expecting what we found when looking at the NAND chips this board sports. Unlike every other Indilinx MLC based SSD we have used, it does not use Samsung NAND; rather it uses Intel.

To be precise the Falcon II 128GB uses Intel 29F64G08CAMD NAND chips and while Intel is not exactly as free with their specifications as Samsung is, what we do know is these chips are 34NM 64gigaBIT (8GB) units. Also nice to see was that G.Skill did not use mixed batches in the same drive as ours had 094415 for the back eight chips and front eight chips.