G.Skill Falcon 128GB Speed results

hawker1986 · 28 May 2009 at 19:45

Hey Guys,

A while ago I got a G.Skill Falcon (same drive as a Vertex) and I promised some results, which I havent had time to post till now...so slightly belated but here they are:

This is on Vista x64 SP2 3 weeks since a clean install (PC has been running about 12 hours straight atm), all the usual tweaks but no TRIM program. Pretty good I think, peak reads of 250mb/s and writes of 200mb/s, which is slightly better than then 230/190 it is rated for.

Well hope thats of some use to someone

Hawker

Nick1881 · 28 May 2009 at 20:23

Wow that's nice!

Looking forward to getting mine, hopefully next week.

Perfect_Chaos · 28 May 2009 at 20:54

I am surprised not many people mention this drive and instead the OCZ Vertex.

I was looking to get one of these, 2 x 64gb in RAID or 1 128gb.

But with news of price cuts by half in a few months or so it has put me off a bit.

hawker1986 · 28 May 2009 at 21:19

Yeah I expected things to change pretty fast, but I wanted to see what all the fuss is about and when sata 3 is out ill upgrade then. This can always go in the laptop

Hawker

seekdestroy · 29 May 2009 at 10:48

Perfect_Chaos said:
But with news of price cuts by half in a few months or so it has put me off a bit.

Can you link me to this news? im also interested in SSD's but thought i better wait anyway

Paramount · 29 May 2009 at 11:50

The price drop news is of course just speculation. If you want one just get one, it's not gonna be a life changing difference anyway.

miniyazz · 29 May 2009 at 16:33

SATA 3 (official name is SATA 6Gb/s to avoid confusin with SATA 2, which has speeds of 3 Gb/s) is already out. Was released yesterday or the day before. Apparently hardware supporting it will be launched at Computex next week.

explicit4u · 30 May 2009 at 18:21

Will be demonstrated but not launched to consumers, SATA 3 will not be in full swing until 1H 2010, also remember the need for a new motherboard as well.

Wait, can't you just get a SATA 3 SATA card and just plug it into your PCI slot instead of getting a new motherboard?

leexgx · 30 May 2009 at 18:29

200MB/s should be plenty for currant SSDs, its the access speeds that makes them respond so fast

miniyazz · 30 May 2009 at 20:12

explicit4u said:
Wait, can't you just get a SATA 3 SATA card and just plug it into your PCI slot instead of getting a new motherboard?

Yes that will be possible, but they may of course not come cheap.. we wait and see.
Plus it's pointless for most people, only those with the next generation of SSDs will actually see a benefit. And PCI slot would be useless, it's slower than SATA 2, but PCI-e x4 would be fine (or PCI-X).

Perfect_Chaos · 30 May 2009 at 22:09

Paramount said:
The price drop news is of course just speculation. If you want one just get one, it's not gonna be a life changing difference anyway.

No but whats the point of shelling out if you want something thats about to drop in price, but dont really need it yet? it is a little wasteful.. unless of course you have a good amount of money.

The problem is, we dont really know if the price cuts are going to affect the faster drives or the slower drives. Unless confirmed

D D Danneh · 30 May 2009 at 22:19

Perfect_Chaos said:
I am surprised not many people mention this drive and instead the OCZ Vertex.

Because it's not listed on OCUK, that's why.

explicit4u · 31 May 2009 at 10:35

What is your Windows Vista Score for these drives?

You should try Windows 7

hawker1986 · 31 May 2009 at 20:28

7.1, which is too low if u ask me considering a normal drive gets 5.9

Hawker

Undesirable · 31 May 2009 at 20:45

Should people really trust Windows scores?

hawker1986 · 31 May 2009 at 22:01

Theyre ok as a guide, not really something I would put much faith in though.

Hawker

D D Danneh · 31 May 2009 at 22:17

Most of the time a higher score means a better part, but that's it really. They aren't a direct representative of the components actual performance. That's what benchmarks are for. An SSD with a score of 6 doesn't mean it is twice as good as an SSD or HDD with 3.

leexgx · 1 Jun 2009 at 00:06

7.1 for the SSD is fine means its an good SSD, SSDs get 6.0 and higher + (mine is 7.1)
bad SSDs end up below far below 5.9 as far as i know on win 7 , as the disk test does do an Write test and thats where JMicron drives fail on

in that last comment, the score does have some meaning

(Max is 7.9 on windows 7) you need 2 SSDs in raid 0 i think to get that but could be incorrect, but best not to raid SSDs just get the one you need

Undesirable · 1 Jun 2009 at 02:25

One thing I've noticed about Vista (and may also be the case in Windows 7) is that when you stop the ReadyBoost service, it seems to cause Windows to take considerably longer to boot up, and it even causes my Raptor X to 'choke' during the Vista boot screen. I'm not sure how to explain it, the Raptor X seems to make a lot more mechanical noise than it does with ReadyBoost enabled.

I have some suspicion that disabling the SuperFetch service also causes startup applications to take longer loading up. Ridiculously longer than XP. Of course, I'm not sure that any of this makes any difference when you have a nice quick SSD. I know the SuperFetch service is only supposed to load things into RAM after you've logged on based on usage patterns, but for me it seems to also affect startup applications like AntiVirus, Firewall, Sound Card Control Panel, Graphics Card Control Panel, etc. All of them seem a lot more sluggish to load up than it did with XP, and there is a lot more hard disk activity.

leexgx · 1 Jun 2009 at 02:35

readyboost loads up an file on boot up stopping that is not an good idea on HDDs and superfetch is what fills the ram up after desktop load (readyboost files are in the same place as prefechers files)

Ready boost i guess should be turned off on SSDs as its should not be needed (going to test now)