G.Skill 64GB SATA II SSD Review

Performance Results Con't

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system “beeps!” and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's “day to day” OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.


Considering this drive is really designed for laptops these are very impressive performance numbers and you could easily use this as your main system's OS drive. Heck, 3 seconds is nothing when it comes to startup times and considering the Velociraptor is the top dog right now in the PC market this is a bloody well impressive showing from the G.Skill SSD.


ADOBE Photoshop CS3 LOAD TIME

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of cirumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Lets see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!


Talk about reversal of fortunes! The SSD was faster than the Velociraptor and that is darn impressive. The amazingly fast random access speed is what obviously made the difference and allowed the relatively slower drive the ability to power past the speedy Vraptor. Hopefully, this also puts to bed the RAID 0 speed myth when it comes to real world applications.


Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it can not really tell you how your hard drive will perform in “real world” situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containg 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer too and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the dive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.


Once again this peppy powerhouse with its ultra low random access speed makes all the difference; however, when it comes to single large file transfers the best random access speed doesn’t matter. Of course, considering this is a relatively small drive most people will store their large files on the big (and cheap) drive like the SE16 640 and load only programs and the OS files on the SSD. This would make a great combination and give you the best of both worlds: speed when you need it and storage space galore!


Extended Runtime Testing

Where these units are marketed towards the home environment, it is reasonable to expect them to be able to handle moderate usage, with random reads and writes of various sizes. To test how robust this unit is, and how well it can take handle a marathon stress test, the G.Skill was subjected to a 20hr torture session. During this time IOMeter was setup to run for 20 hours using various size tests all with completely random read/write scenarios.

During this testing the drive only got about 8° C above ambient, and to say that we were impressed is an understatement. For the whole time this drive had no active cooling and it was completely up to the metal case to dissipate the minor heat it generates.