Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Gorgeous and very fast is what the Titan offers in terms of the Titan product series. I was literally blown away by the performance this SSD has to offer.

We however need to address something in this conclusion. Previous models SSD apparently had some issues within the JMicron controller related to slower write issues caused by the JMicron (JMF602) SSD controller. It is exactly the thing we mentioned in all our SSD reviews. Really small files (8KB and less) during heavy use on a Jmicron controller based SSD can literally choke on a lot of incoming data. The controller reports back to Windows XP/Vista that it's buffers are filled and writes and reads will be queued up. This pauses incoming and outgoing disk activity, causing applications to freeze up while the SSD controller finishes it's queue.

Real world example: how does that relate to you in a real world experience? Well, say you load up a webpage, do some IM chatting and check your email all simultaneously. In that scenario then occasionally you might have a ~1 second pause. This is the underlying issue that is being discussed on the web. Now I am not justifying or defending the issue, as .. well really .. we should not have this kind of thing really. The question is more, how big of an issue would that be for you ? See, that's for you to decide.

Now the Titan read and write performance have improved as the Titan SSD now uses JMicron JMF602B dual drive controller chips. This eliminates some of the above mentioned write performance issues as it has twice the channels and cache of the original release, but yeah, it's still not optimal. So sure, we've mentioned it often writing lots of small files remains an concern for SSDs, especially the ones with JMicron controllers. But once you pass 16KB files, SSDs are the shizznit.

Also, it recently has been proven that much like HDD drives, SSD drives over time can get a little slower. I've been running a SSD myself on my primary work PC since the summer of 2008 now and didn't even notice it, but surely the assumption and explanation is valid. Question remains to be this, if your SSD does 200 MB/sec and after a say a year it's doing say ~150 MB/sec .. how big of an issue is that ? These are valid questions and only time will tell really.

But make no mistake, products like shown today remain horribly fast and you can bypass the bigger part of performance degradation by disabling things like the Vista prefetcher and search indexer, perhaps even assign the Internet explorer temp directory to a HDD and disable drive defragmentation, this will ensure a longer life-span as well.

Compared to SSD, HDD's are of course fantastic as cheap storage devices. They just can't touch a fast SSD when it comes to speed though. Therefore, if you are in the market for an SSD drive, you need to think about that you are going to do with it.

If you work on that PC a lot, chances are good that you want it as the boot/root drive. Fast performance and no noise is just fantastic. Really, nothing comes close to an SSD. If you are a hardcore gamer, you just might settle for a nice HDD as boot drive and install your games at a SSD device, you'll seriously increase level and game load times very much.

For massive storage however, there's nothing that comes close to the traditional HDD, they are now already shining at 2TB (!) and surely SSD volume size is far away from that.

As you can see I am struggling a little with the entire JMicron controller ordeal. Is all the latest media attention blown out of proportion by some media, .. or not ? Fact is that before the controller issues where mentioned ALL reviews were raving. So I have not made up my mind about this topic just yet. The reality is that the G.Skill Titan series SSD shows really impressive performance, and no matter how you look at it, with some precautions it's still way more advanced and faster than any traditional HDD.

Based on my first-hand experiences I would have no hesitation whatsoever swapping it out for a traditional HDD to be honest. In fact to proof a point, I just placed my work PC drive image (windows+applications) on that SSD and started working from it on my primary work PC. I'll keep the Titan in this PC for a couple of months and will share my experiences. So far .. this thing rocks. And as such I will recommend it. So if it meets your budget and purpose, check the product out. It was among the fastest MLC based drive we tested thus far and drips of pure performance.

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