G.Skill Falcon 2 128GB SSD Review

Results Analysis

Considering the Falcon 2’s rated speeds of 220MB/sec read and 150MB/sec, which are notably lower than the full fat Indilinx drives on the market, the Falcon 2 performs superbly, and actually manages to outperform the OCZ Vertex running on the latest firmware in a number of tests.

Sequential performance as measured by AS SSD is superb with the Falcon 2 clocking in at 238MB/s read and 178MB/s write and there’s little drop following heavy use thanks to the TRIM support in the drives firmware with the same test producing 236MB/s read and 174MB/s write after 1TB of writes to the drive.

Looking at access times, again measured using AS SSD, the differences between the “vanilla” Barefoot drives and the combination of Barefoot Eco and Intel NAND are also apparent, with the Falcon 2 delivering access times of 0.139ms read and 0.444ms write, the prior a tiny bit faster than the original Indilinx drives and the latter a tiny bit slower. However, the differential is so small that in real world use it would be impossible to notice the difference between the two. Access times are totally unaffected by heavy use thanks to TRIM.

ATTO performance at 4KB, 64KB and 1024KB is also very good and in line with the original Indilinx drives, with the Falcon 2 a fraction behind the 120GB. What’s interesting though is that the Falcon 2 doesn’t recover as much of its ATTO performance following heavy use as the 120GB Vertex , with noticeable performance drops to write speeds when handling 64KB files (11MB/s) and 1024KB files (5MB/s). This is likely due to the further firmware optimisations in the more recent firmware supported by the Vertex (v.1.5, aka v1916), although the Falcon 2’s recovery is still superb compared to pre-TRIM firmware.

Random read and write performance also sees the Falcon 2 diverge from the original Indilinx Barefoot’s performance and while there are improvements to overall random read speed, up from 35.8MB/s to 38.1MB/s, random write speeds have dropped from the original Indilinx’s 10MB/s to 7.92MB/s. Average random write latencies are also slightly higher at 1.47ms, with the maximum write latency still the lowest of any consumer drive out there.

As usual though, the differences between drive performance so clean under synthetic benchmarks are extremely difficult to notice in real world useage, and when booting Windows 7 the Falcon 2 performs identically to the OCZ Vertex and P128, and is just a second slower than the Intel X25-M 160GB.

Final Thoughts

The Falcon 2 is clearly a very capable drive then, and actually manages to surpass the “vanilla” Barefoot Indilinx drive’s performance in a number of areas, especially when it comes to sequential read and write speeds which are notably faster. While there are some other minor differences, particularly in random read and write performance, on the balance of things it’s fair to say that this cut-price version actually offers superior performance, albeit in our purely synthetic benchmarks.

One cause for concern however is the fact that G.Skill lacks the level of firmware support of a full Indilinx partner, and while the company is faster than many of the other Indilinx drive makers in deploying firmware updates, they have to date all been destructive updates requiring the use of a drive jumper and a second OS install to perform the update – not ideal at all.

Firmware issues have lessened a little now the updates have matured though, helped in the majority by the vital addition of TRIM support and we can see from our testing that there’s no desperate need for an urgent update to the Falcon 2. Realistically the Indilinx Barefoot drive controller has likely reached its peak following twelve months of updates so we doubt there will be many new versions forthcoming now anyway.

All of which leaves the Falcon 2 in a very attractive position. With a £40 price advantage over Samsung NAND-based Indilinx Barefoot drives, superior performance in a number of areas and a retail firmware that’s more than up to scratch so long as you’re using the drive in a single drive configuration in Windows 7 (realistically the only way we’d recommend using any SSD right now), it ticks all the boxes we’re looking for from an SSD.

The only concern is the imminent arrival of the next generation of SSD drive controllers, but as these will carry an inevitable price premium (and in the case of the new Sandforce drives, will offer markedly lower formatted capacities) there’s still room in the market for a lower priced option. If only NAND pricing were to fall a decent amount to make a “lower priced” SSD cost less than what is still a very pricey £260 we’d really see some fireworks but for now the Falcon2 is a capable, cheaper and most importantly very fast addition to the SSD market and is more than worthy of a recommendation.
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Score Guide