G.Skill Falcon II 128GB SSD Review

Crystal DiskMark

Crystal DiskMark is designed to quickly test the performance of your hard drives. Currently, the program allows to measure sequential and random read/write speeds; and allows you to set the number of tests iterations to run. We left the number of tests at 5. When all 5 tests for a given section were run Crystal DiskMark then averages out all 5 numbers to give a result for that section.

Read Performance


If we didn’t know better we would say this drive was actually a flagship model based on results like this. Up until now the differences between it and the premier Falcon model have been small enough that you can put it down to firmware differences; however, the differences shown here are significant and are puzzling. They are puzzling because this drive is actually better in all three categories than the original Falcon and in the all important small 4k reads it is placed higher than the SLC Agility EX! The most likely explanation for these discrepancies is the fact that this drive uses 34NM Intel NAND, and boy when it comes to read these chips are real beasts.


Write Performance


Finally we get to see a true insight to what this drive is made of. Its numbers are good. In fact, it’s sequential and 512KB test results are actually an improvement (as expected from moving to 34NM NAND), but the all important small 4k tests numbers are low; to be precise they are 30.8% lower than the older Falcon. This is not a good thing, but it is the first sign we have been given that this drive is a mid-tier unit and not a flagship model. We have a feeling that the real world performance test numbers will most likely fall in between the extremes we are seeing from synthetic to synthetic test. Until then we will not really know exactly how good (or bad) a bang for your buck this drive really is.

Random Access Time

To obtain the absolute, most accurate Random access time, h2benchw was used for this benchmark. This benchmark tests how quickly different areas of the drive can be accessed. A low number means that the drive space can be accessed quickly while a high number means that more time is taken trying to access different parts of the drive. To run this program, one must use a DOS prompt and tell it what sections of the test to run. While one could use “h2benchw 1 -english -s -tt "harddisk test" -w test” for example and just run the seek tests, we took the more complete approach and ran the full gamut of tests and then extracted the necessary information from the text file. This is the command line argument we used “h2benchw 1 -a -! -tt "harddisk drivetest" -w drivetest”. This tells the program to write all results in english, save them in drivetest.txt file, do write and read tests and do it all on drive 1 (or the second drive found, with 0 being the OS drive).


New revision or no, the controller in this drive is at heart a Barefoot controller and thus acts and performs just like all Barefoot controllers we have looked at in the past. This is not a bad thing as it does make the Falcon II all the more attractive to the bargain hunter in us.