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G. Skill Titan 256GB SSD Review

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AkG

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IOMETER Results / Stutter Test

IOMETER


IOMeter is heavily weighted towards the server end of things, and since we here at HWC are more End User centric we will be setting and judging the results of IOMeter a little bit differently than most. To test each drive we ran 5 test runs per HDD (1,4,16,64,128 que depth) each test having 8 parts, each part lasting 10 min w/ an additional 20 second ramp up. The 8 subparts were set to run 100% random, 80% read 20% write; testing 512b, 1k, 2k,4k,8k,16k,32k,64k size chunks of data. When each test is finished IOMeter spits out a report, in that reports each of the 8 subtests are given a score in I/Os per second. We then take these 8 numbers add them together and divide by 8. This gives us an average score for that particular que depth that is heavily weighted for single user environments.

GSkill_Titan_IOMeter.jpg


Eeep! The underpowered RAID controller chickens have certainly come home to roost. These numbers are what you would expect from a middle of the road spindle drive….and certainly NOT a high tech SSD. I am not sure why Samsung continues the love affair with JMicron but it really is handicapping their drives. IF you are going to do a RAID 0 SSD….for the love of all that is holy please drop JMicron like the bad apple they are. This is not a cheap drive, yet when the commands start coming fast, furious and totally random the JMB390 runs crying home to momma. This is JMicron and Samsung’s third chance here at HWC and they are obviously missing the boat.


IOMETER Stutter Test


In our usual IOMeter test we are trying to replicate real world use where reads severly outnumber writes. However, to get a good handle on how well a Solid State Drive will handle a worse case scenario (and thus how likely the dreaded stutter issue will happen) we have also run an additional test. This test is made of 1 section at que depth of 1. In this test we ran 100% random. 100% writes of 4k size chunks of information. In the .csv file we then found the Maximum Write Response Time. This in ms is worst example of how long a given operation took to complete. We consider anything higher than 333ms (one third of a second) to be a good indicator that stuttering may happen, with the higher the number the worse the duration of the stutter will most likely be.

GSkill_Titan_stutter.jpg

While the Titan may totally and completely tank at the regular IOMeter test, at least it passes the Stutter test. 0.4 seconds may not be wonderful but they are certainly a vast improvement over the previous generation…and are probably low enough that any stutters which do occur will be short enough to be imperceptible. Of course, this reduced stutter latency does come at a price, namely the fact that the average latency of the Titan is not all that great. Its not that bad either as less than a tenth of a second is barely perceptible but there is still room for improvement.
 
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AkG

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XP Startup / Adobe Load Time

Real World Performance


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.

GSkill_Titan_boot.jpg

The time it takes to completely boot up and load XP is getting shorter and shorter as we progress into these reviews. Too bad this revolution is coming just as it becomes EOL. As for the Titan, 42 seconds to load XP is the best we have seen and it is glaringly obvious, real world tests like this play to its strengths and not its weaknesses. More importantly it really does highlight how inaccurate a picture even the best synthetic tests can give.


ADOBE CS3 LOAD TIME

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, 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!

GSkill_Titan_adobe.jpg


As we saw with the boot times, the Titan simply eats everything (including the X25) for lunch. For day to day tasks….like booting up your system or loading applications the Titan is the best you can get. The Intel X25 may rule the synthetic arena but it looks like the Titan is going to dominate at least a good portion of the real world; and we will take real world performance over theoretical performance any day!
 
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AkG

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Real World Data Transfers

Real World Data Transfers


No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter 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 containing 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.


GSkill_Titan_copy_small.jpg


GSkill_Titan_copy_big.jpg


GSkill_Titan_copy_self.jpg


For the most part the Titan puts in a very good showing. It may lose out to the X25 on writes but it still is a very, very good second best; one which easily outperforms both the older SLC and MLC drives. However, as we saw in the synthetic benchmarks, and is further backed up by the copy to itself results, this device has been handicapped by RAID controller which is just not powerful enough to completely get the job done. The controller idea certainly has merit and for the most part is a very good option…but it still needs work to be great.
 
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AkG

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Real World Stutters / Value

Real World Stutters


Over a three day period we used the SSD as our main OS drive. During this period we did everything in our power to make the drive stutter. This is what we found out.

It really is hard to make the Titan stutter, and we had to work at it to get it to stutter enough to be considered anything more than “a meaningful pause” length of time. You really need to work at and copy a bunch of large and small files from the drive to itself (all at the same time), do a virus scan, watch a couple of Youtube videos…etc…etc before this drive will get something which has some semblance to the hiccups. To reduce these problems we first turned off Indexing, PreFetch / SuperFetch, short file names, disabled timestamp for last access of files, re enabled write caching on the disk, moved the page file to another drive, and couple of other minor tweaks. This took care of all but a few of the stutters and reduced those stutter times significantly. Unless you really, really want to get the absolute best from this drive, this amount of tweaking will probably be enough for most users to be completely satisfied. However, stuttering did occasionally still happen (though it acted more like an overworked spindle drive in that everything first got real slooooow and was only after we kept pushing it did long stutters start to appear).

In order to really get rid of them and squeeze out the last drop of performance we had to get out the big guns and aligned the partition for optimized 4k sector allocation with a 128 sector offset (though we too agree that a 256 sector offset may net even better results with these RAID 0 drives). This was accomplished via Diskpar and if you are interested in doing this major tweak there is a great guide floating around on an certain forum which we can PM you if you so wish. If you are running Vista you can actually use the Recovery Disk to accomplish this (with Diskpar) but we did it the old fashioned way: setting the system up to temporarily use another drive as the OS drive and has this Drive as the Slave; followed by doing an old fashioned fresh install (without destroying the partition). Doing this resulted in a stutter free environment, one which was bloody damn quick.


Extended Runtime Testing


Where these units are marketed towards the home user and laptop 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. All temperature readings are taken directly from the hottest part of the drive case using a Digital Infrared Thermometer. The infrared thermometer used has a 9 to 1 ratio, meaning that at 9cm it takes it reading from a 1 square cm. To obtain the numbers used in this review the thermometer was held approximately 3cm away from the heatsink and only the hottest number obtained was used.

During this testing the drive got hot, not overly hot but hot enough to be noticeable. At the end of the day it got about 24° C above ambient, and to say that we were shocked is an understatement. The extra controller and raid controller really do add to the thermal envelope of this bad boy.


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 this review.

titan_value.jpg

It seems that the shear size of this drive really does help not only its performance numbers but it's value as well. G.Skill really has aggressively priced thd Titan and we have a feeling its going to pay off in spades for them. Bravo G.Skill for not trying to bleed your customers dry in return for giving them their bleeding edge fix.
 
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AkG

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Conclusion

Conclusion


There certainly is no denying it; the dual JMicron with a RAID controller in the Titan does improve the performance of this drive over much of the competition. In some cases the performance increase was drastic and quite impressive. However, like most things in life; there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch since we were extremely disappointed by its IOMeter results as they were simply terrible. Of course, IOMeter doesn’t like RAID 0 setups unless it’s on a powerful massive scale with loads of drives involved (like the X25 basically is).

We can spend ages talking about how the RAID controller shows its Achilles' heel every now and then but there is no denying that it does make a difference and it has a definite positive impact on the dreaded stutter issue. Unfortunately, this setup does feel a lot like a kludge….a kick ass kludge but still a kludge never the less. We are not sure how kind history is going to be to this setup, as G.Skill and Samsung once again didn’t get it all right since these drives are crying out for cache. IF the onboard RAID controller was a little bit more powerful and had 32MB (or preferably 64MB) of onboard cache this could have been an X-25 killer but a lot more expensive to boot. As it stands the Titan is one monster of an SSD, one which may be hobbled by triple JMircon controllers, but the handicap has been drastically reduced.

In the end, this drive is big, fast and powerful; and even more importantly, it really only requires a few easy to implement tweaks to reduce perceived stutters drastically. This combination is more than enough for us to in good faith give it a Dam Innovative Award for its unique take on overcoming the JMicron challenges. We also give it our Dam Good Value award due to the fact that is has over four times the capacity of a single Intel X-25M while retaining much of the more expensive drive's performance. Hopefully, Samsung (or at least G. Skill) will see the light and kick the JM602 (and JMB390) controller to the curb and put a suitably powerful controller in their future lines.


Pros:

- Great performance
- Large 256GB size
- Improved stutter handling
- Dual controllers
- Very good $/GB ratio versus other SSDs


Cons:

- Write performance still less than X-25M
- Stutter issue still exists
- Only 2 year warranty
- Increased thermal output
- Dual controllers are still JM602s


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