Final Words & Conclusion
The Verdict
I already mentioned in the introduction that I'm continuously amazed how quickly performance is advancing and developing for SSD drives. It's a really weird curve to observe. On one hand, you see these drives get faster with each month that passes, yet the prices are coming down as well. It's a brilliant development for sure.
SSD drives are fast, amazingly fast. But sure, they do come with one culprit, when you have loads of small files (smaller than 16KB) written at once or consistently, that's where the Achilles heel of any SSD drive is to be found. Traditional HDDs are much faster in that area. If you'd use an SSD as boot drive, you can easily bypass that bottleneck by disabling stings like the Vista Prefetcher and search indexer. Also disable drive defragmentation.
When you look at the other side of the scope, the SSD will eliminate any traditional drive in it's way after you pass that 16KB block file size. A SSD, like the one shown today, still gives me wrinkles in my forehead whenever I run tests and observe that speed.
The G.Skill as tested today is fast, but since the development rate is so hefty, there will be (and currently even are) faster drives out there. Intel's new X25 for example can achieve over 250 MB/sec write performance. That X25 is also 3 to 4 times more expensive to what we have shown you today while still being an MLC drive. Something to think about for sure.
I still say though, that I favor SLC over MLC drives anytime, purely based on the fact that it lasts 10x longer than an MLC based SSD. The unfortunate fact however remains, it's also a much more expensive technology. You can easily double up the price if you want an SLC drive, and right now that's just not something the consumer likes to see. I do think though, that inevitably the industry must and will move onwards to SLC. But if an MLC drive can last 10 years or longer .. heck the reality here would be that this is probably even longer than the lifespan of your average traditional HDDs.
It is obvious that there are some things to really like about SSD drives like boot speed, application launch times, and battery life / power consumption. On the down side you have price and slower speeds at really small file-sizes (below 16KB). Ideally you could combine both a HDD and SSD. One as boot / OS drive, the rest as file-storage.
Right now G.Skills product are a tad hard to find in Europe, though we spotted good availability in Northern America.
The G.Skill SATA II 2.5" SSD 64 GB MLC version can be bought for just over $150 USD, the 128 GB version for roughly 260 USD. These drives come with a two year warranty and quite honestly if you are willing to pay a little more for your storage, come very much recommended. The latest SSD drives are very impressive you guys, very impressive.
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