GSKILL Phoenix Blade 480GB PCIe SSD Review
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Noufel
Reminds me of the new corsair logo 🙂 very nice performance btw .
SoloCreep
I remember a friend of mine bought some of the first sticks of mem from Gskill when they first came out . He took a gamble and bought some and they turned out to be faster than anything else at the time. As soon as I seen the name on this article I knew this was going to be something amazing but I was not expecting these insane speeds! Very impressive!
Those are some nice tests Hilbert, you do great work 😉.
Tripkebab
I dont think PCIe SSD's will take off in the consumer market, I had a RevoDrivex2 back in the day, and while they are good they offer two dissadvantages.
1. Boot time is slower as they need to initialise raid.
2. Multiple SSD's on one card means your standard rate of failure x number of SSD 'modules' decreases overall reliability.
Also by my experience in selling my revodrive, alot of system compatibility issues can be a problem, had my card returned to me twice as either they didnt know how to set it up or there system wasnt compatible.
Guessing people will be reluctant to fill their pcie slots with ssd's, perhaps one for a boot drive, but then if you just need one you would go the M2 route which is where it's at.
Nono06
Not all PCIE SSD are raid 0 based 🙂
For a product of that price, it should be NVME compliant, not AHCI.
Tripkebab
Very true!, but then your chopping down on your performance, which then brings into question why your going PCIe in the firstplace! (with current hardware that is).
I've not seen any real life consumer benchmarks between NVME and AHCI so cant comment there for any real gains it would offer, i hear it does reduce power consumption however which would always be a bonus!
schmidtbag
If a SSD has it's own dedicated RAID controller, I'm not all that concerned about data integrity. The reason RAID 0 is so scary is because of hard drives. Mechanical hard drives can fail at any moment and often without warning. When that happens, you lose the entire array. Also since they're mechanical, they're more prone to corruption or mistakes. SSDs, to my knowledge, don't just suddenly die and it is a lot harder to screw up data.
The reason I personally am not fond of SSDs in arrays is because seek time worsens and if you have an SSD fast enough, the difference in read/write speeds rarely has any effect on real-world applications. If you have a couple budget SSDs I suppose putting them in RAID would be worth it.
Tripkebab
Oh but they do suddently die, not only that you dont get the old clinking and whiring warning sounds as you did with mechanical drives.
schmidtbag
I feel like that problem doesn't exist anymore. I know that used to be a serious issue but I haven't heard of new SSDs encountering sudden death issues.
blkspade
Yeah as I read through the article I was wondering about price. In thinking of the description of the drives architecture, in reference single drives wouldn't it to be worthwhile to test 4 120GB drives in RAID 0 in comparison. The cheapest highly rated 120GD SSDs on newegg are $70 each. At $280 for 4 or even $500 for the very highest rated drives, I'd be curious of those results.
LesserHellspawn
For a truly fair test, you'd have to run this against 4 standard 120 GB SSDs in RAID 0. In read speed that would probaly be equal at a fraction of the price. And PCIe SSDs take away one of those precious slots, of which some systems have only 5 or 6 and at most 7, usually with 1-3 graphics cards already occupying/blocking up to 6. Add a dedicated Soundcard and maybe a Killer NIC, and you're out of slots quickly.
goat1
I had this exact issue when my Revo drive x2 died. No warning. Only had the operating system on it,so there's that. Besides,I don't think anyone is going to put anything crucial on an SSD drive,just the operating system.
I've had way too many seagate drives die on me. Platter drives don't always warn you either.
qwwwizx
Well, it might be fast, but this is 4 x Samsung 840 EVO 120GB drives in stripe using the default intel IRST controller.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-Ogrh5Y4aagg/VGUdAgnI4KI/AAAAAAABHeA/UYt809gifhU/s755/Untitled1.png
Compared to this from the article:
http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/gskill_phoenix_blade_480gb_pcie_ssd_review,15.html
koliko
Great product but why is basic stuff like boot time to OS or loading time for games missing in review? To put only speed (MB/s) is taken out of context because you cant check delay which is created by raid and sandforce.
So is there any faster loading time compare to ordinary SSD?
SoloCreep
Once upon a time I thought mechanical Seagate drives were great, they were all I would buy until I had 3 of them die on me one after the other with out warning. Since then I've used only Western Digital and have not had any just die on me. As for SSD's I would never use one for storage unless of course I win the lottery. They are definitely good for video editing or recording a game at 60fps where the writes are 4gb every 10 seconds.
Nono06
NVME normally brings a big performance boost, in particular for parallel accesses.
For those who do not want to "loose" one PCIE port, the M.2 alternative might be the solution. (it was my case 🙂)
Moreover, I do not think any of the current M2 PCIe SSD are using RAID.
Here is what I got with my XP941
http://s30.postimg.org/6wej2g6q9/Capture.png
NAMEk
I won't compare prices with hdd, not because hdd has a lot more materials which cost more than ssd, and to make hdd costs more than ssd. But for 480GB i wouldn't pay more than 300USD hence the speed of it. I did survey at my job. Asked people(customers) how much would they pay for an ssd of 200GB, 99 out of 100 said no more than 100USD. I selected those who understand speed of data throughput. What does that tell you? Huge corporations won't even look at it.
GhostXL
When SSD's were first starting out, yeah they had that problem a lot.
With SSD's over the last 2 years it's dwindled to any other standard PC component failure rate wise.
They have gotten much better over the years.
