G.Skill Phoenix 100GB Solid State Drive 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.


HDTach really doesn’t shed any light on to whether or not the Phoenix can compete with the Vertex 2 as it really only tests sequential read speed. The Phoenix’s read performance is slightly behind that of the Vertex 2 but it is not the Vertex 2 firmware giving it an “unfair” advantage on sequential speed compared to the others. As we discussed earlier in this review the sequential speed was not really affected by SandForce in their 305 firmware. The minor differences from SandForce drive to SandForce drive is most likely is a direct result of the different NAND chips used and has nothing to do with firmware or what was done differently between the Vertex 2’s and the others.

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.


When it comes to the read performance of the various levels of NAND there is not that much difference between them, BUT when it comes to write speed there is indeed a big difference and this is a perfect example. This difference is totally and completely because G.Skill went with better NAND than the competition.