GSkill Falcon 128GB SSD review - Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Well yeah .. that was surprising wasn't it? Man this thing nearly flies in your PC, astonishing performance, really astonishing. One remark; as you have been able to see, this product is faster than the OCZ Vertex, while the components used are nearly identical. When we reviewed the OCZ drive, right after the publication a new firmware was released, bringing more performance to that drive.

This particular Falcon SSD has that new firmware. So apples for apples .. performance in the end would be roughly the same. And that performance is astonishing.

My opinion about JMicron based SSD drives is quickly changing, clearly SSD drives with a nice phat cache are the way to go, if anything the G.Skill Falcon proves that very clearly.

Now, a review like this shows peak performance, over time your SSD will get a little slower. And that differs per SSD type, firmware and functionality. It is safe to say that you might lose 25% performance over time.

But still, right now we are closing in on the limitation of the SATA 2 interface _real_ fast, and that's the next bottleneck to tackle. Luckily a new SATA specification is already in the works, delivering a nice 6 GHz bandwidth frequency with ~ 600 MB/specifications.

But at the rate we are going, that 600 MB/sec does not sound that crazy anymore does it? It's amazing how fast SSD technology is evolving and it's definitely the ideal storage solution of the very near future.

The G.Skill Falcon series SSD drives are to date the best SSDs we have ever tested. And I know I have to state that on a weekly basis with every and any new review on an SSD, but heck .. it's the truth. It is inexplicable how fast it really is.

We are delighted to see G.Skill move onwards to the Indilinx controller with Samsung flash memory ICs, that choice is golden. And with the 64MB cache memory on board the SSD you dissolve issues that the JMicron products show, slow write speeds of high volume small files.

There's only one thing that remains to be discussed, and that's pricing. This 128GB model sells at 309 USD and surely that is just a lot of money. Personally I feel very strongly that the extra cash spent on the cache memory is worth the investment, but really .. that's your call to make of course.

Seriously, it is nearly far-fetched how much you'd enjoy a drive like tested today. Let me end with my standard snippet in all SSD reviews. You do buy an MLC SSD flash memory drive on borrowed time. We here at Guru3D.com wish very much that the industry would move to SLC based NAND flash memory, as it's life span is at least 10x better. So please do disable defragmentation, the prefetcher and search indexer to ensure your SSD will last you many many years.

When it comes to performance, the Falcon is just extremely fast, it's one of these products you've all been waiting for. G.Skill has an incredible product on their hands here, definitely worth our Top Pick award and as such highly recommended.

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