GSkill Falcon 128GB SSD review - Introduction

When OCZ released their Vertex drives a few weeks ago, next to being shocked, I was already wondering how fast the market would pick up on the technology used in that SSD. It was merely a week later when we received a press-release from G.Skill, announcing a very similar product to that Vertex drive SSD. I mention the OCZ Vertex here as it was simply the best SSD we have tested to date.

Today, believe it or not, G.Skill is going to trump that product. With each and every SSD review we publish the bar is set higher, and the fact is that SSD technology is evolving at such an incredible rate that we are closing in on the limitations of the SATA2 interface. At 3 GHz SATA2 can manage roughly 300 MB/sec bus bandwidth. With today's tested product we pass 250 MB/sec which is crazy when you think about it.

G.Skill has a product here that they should be very proud of, as they made a touch choice, they also are moving towards the all new Indilinx Barefoot controller inside that SSD drive. As such they can fight off the small-block size issues plaguing SSDs based on the JMicron controllers. This product has that phat 64MB cache inside the falcon to deal with it, and combined with Samsung NAND flash modules we reach over 250 MB/sec read speeds and get this, 190 MB/sec write speeds.

As a result, this drive is competing at any and every level with the OCZ Vertex series drives, and if you read that review .. you'll agree with me that these are likely among the best SSDs available on the market, currently.

One thing is a sure fact this G.Skill Falcon SSD drive wipes the floor clean with JMicron controller based SSD drives, and this article will back that up.

So head on over the the next page. In this review we'll cover our standard snippet on SSD drives, then dig a little deeper into the G.Skill Falcon, throw some benchmarks at it .. and allow this SSD to scream out loud and proud. Next page please.