G.Skill Falcon II 128GB SSD Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these hard drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based drives. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of; but the more important number is the Average Speed number. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average the faster your entire system will seem.



At an average of just of 223MB/s this drive is slightly slower than the original Falcon, but is far, far from what we would consider “slow”. A difference of 7.3MB/s is really not all that much (about 3.2%) and quite honestly it is doubtful you would ever notice this slight variance in real world conditions. It seems that Indilinx Barefoot controllers and HDTach still don’t like each other as the “burst” rate is still out to lunch, though this drive is actually faster at bursting than its predecessors. Like we said, we don’t put much stock (let alone faith) in burst speeds so it is neither here nor there in the grand scheme of things.

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities the HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.


Also as expected the average write speed is slower than the original but still impressive nonetheless. The fact that a drive which is marketed more as a “mid-tier” solution than a flagship model can post average write speeds in excess of 181MB/s just shows how far the SSD market (or storage in general for that matter) has come in such a short period of time. For anyone keeping score the difference between the Falcon II and the original Falcon works out to be 12.5MB/s or about 6.5%. Of course, you have to consider the fact that the original Falcon was running earlier firmware than our Falcon II is, so it is not exactly a fair “apples to apples” comparison.