G.Skill Phoenix 100GB Solid State Drive Review

Value

The term “Value” is such an amorphous term that it truly has different meanings for different people. For some a hard drive is only as good as its performance potential, for others it is how quiet or durable it is; for others still it’s how effective it is for its cost. We here at HWC try to provide as many answers as possible for the term “Value”. Hopefully by this point in the review people looking at performance potential will have a fairly good idea of what its Value is. For the “best bang for the buck” crowd we have included a chart below showing how much a give drive costs per GB . No consideration has been made for performance, “durability” or any other extraneous factors; this is just raw performance vs. monetary cost. All prices are based on the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of their initial review for the "Original" chart and are the lowest price found in our Price Comparison engine at the time of this review for the "Updated" chart.


There is no denying that $3.63 per GB is bloody expensive for 100GB of space; however you can make a very good case that “value” is relative. For example, the Phoenix is new to the market but comes in at only a little more then what a Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB cost when first released, yet it blows by the spindle-based drive in terms of performance. The same can be said of the other SandForce drives we have reviewed as the Phoenix is always just as fast as them, or faster, yet costs noticeably less. To us this means that when you are shopping for an enthusiast grade solid state drive the Phoenix can be considered one heck of a good value!