Final Words and Verdict
The verdict
Once again G.Skill managed to put a product on the market that impresses a lot. If they can put this drive on the market at a reasonable price then they might have found Willy Wonka's golden ticked in their sales. However, the competition is stiff alright, they fight with names like ADATA, OCZ and Corsair. The last one is charging roughly 320 EUR for this drive right now and we see OCZ charging 350 EUR for the 100 GB model. So in order for G.Skill to make a difference, the 100 GB Phoenix will need to be priced at roughly 300 EUR.
Performance was good, really good actually. The drive is a tiny notch slower than OCZ's Vertex 2, but they have their own proprietary design and firmware. Comparing apples to apples, the Vertex 2 might be a tiny bit faster, in real-world usage however that is something you'd never notice.
SandForce1200 controller based SSDs as shown today are extremely good in productivity, they handle small files exceptionally well. Where they really shine though is writing small files (4KB) random, the In/Out performance there is phenomenal. That alone though, is not enough to justify a higher price over the Indilinx based product as with desktop usage, again you'd probably won't even notice it -- SSDs with cache memory like Indilinx are already so fast.
The SandForce1200 based Phoenix is an out of this world product, but they do have one downside, for a technical reason SandForce reserves nearly 20 GB in storage volume size, depending on the model of course, for performance enhancements.
New Firmware revisions are already freeing up some of that excessive amount of unused yet costly NAND memory. So while you gain more (extensively more) random IO write performance, you loose a fifth to a sixth of your volume size and the product is slightly more expensive (though now falling in price slowly) .
Never ever has competition in the SSD arena been this fierce, we see many companies jump on it and sell them. Then on the ODM side we have names like Intel, JMicron, Indilinx, and SandForce battling for your money fiercely. The positive side-effect of that is that SSDs anno 2010 took a massive leap in overall performance, we now see product that we could not even have dreamed of 2-3 years ago. And meanwhile (though still very expensive) prices are coming down slowly.
If you have the money for it, use an SSD like the G.Skill Phoenix as boot/root diver for your OS, Games and applications and pop in a nice massive HDD for storage of your documents, music and movies. That very combination is brilliant and though people are still very weary making a move from HDD to SSD, we can only say .. once you've turned SSD, there's now way in hell you'll ever want to go back.
The G.Skill Phoenix was a pleasure to test, the numbers where absolutely great and even closing in on the Vertex 2. If priced right we can highly recommend it.
* update 25th June 2010 - warranty is extended to three years.
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