G.Skill Phoenix 100GB Solid State Drive Review

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’s memory 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 gamout 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).


It appears that a SandForce drive is a SandForce drive when it comes to random access times regardless of any modifications made to the NAND. Of course, the fact that the Phoenix can keep up with both a drive running earlier “full speed” firmware and the Vertex 2 with its custom firmware is nonetheless impressive.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

The ATTO disk benchmark tests the drives read and write speeds using gradually larger size files. For these tests, the ATTO program was set to run from its smallest to largest value (.5KB to 8192KB) and the total length was set to 256MB. The test program then spits out an extrapolated performance figure in megabytes per second.

Read

While on the surface the Phoenix, F100 and Vertex 2 all have the same read power curve, looks can be deceiving. The Phoenix at what amounts to almost every file size is slightly faster than the other SandForce drives. Big files, little files, the Phoenix really does do a slightly better job at reading them.

Write

Except for one or two minor blips the Phoenix is once again just as fast as the Vertex 2, if not just a little bit faster here and there. It really does seem that G.Skill have come up with the answer to the SandForce firmware conundrum. Hopefully, other companies will follow suit and simply use higher grade NAND rather than giving into SandForce intentionally gimping their drives.