GSKILL Phoenix Blade 480GB PCIe SSD Review - Product Showscase

Product Showscase

The following images were taken at high-resolution and then cropped and scaled down. The camera used was a Canon 450D 12 MegaPixel.

And there you have it, the GSKILL Phoenix Blade 480 GB version, it can be easily recognized by the dark cover, too bad the PCB isn't black, that would have looked really nice. We will be testing the 480 GB model today. The Phoenix Blade PCIE SSD uses G.SKILL RAID driver, which also makes the device bootable. During the OS install you can load up the RAID driver and work your way through from there on. It is also compatible with the latest UEFI BIOSes.

If you did not get what this product is by now, the unit is a bootable PCIe drive with RAID support and the current generation of SandForce controllers. Basically these are four SSDs tied together into one product running over RAID and then the data ends up at the PCIe slot. Let me peel off the cover though, there you go:

With four controllers the SSD is pushing roughly up-to 2.0 GB/s reads and writes. That is of course wahaaaay beyond anything you'd need on your average PC, you can see a second PCB which we can screw off.
 

There are multiple SSD partitions, four of them have Toshiba 19 nm asynchronous NAND flash ICs tied to them and four Sandforce controllers are present spread out over the two PCBs.