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Today we are checking out the new G.Skill Falcon II which is set to become one of the cheapest SSDs money can buy. Generally the words “cheap” and “SSD” do not go together, and when they do it’s rarely a good thing. However the Falcon II aims to deliver quality SSD performance at an affordable price, and we aim to find out if it does... Throughout the course of this year we have reviewed a number of high-end products ranging from graphics cards made up of over 4 billion transistors with peak bandwidths of over 250GB/s, to eight threaded processors capable of operating at well beyond 3.0GHz! However, out of all the crazy and impressive hardware that we have reviewed this year, it is the Solid-State Disk that really caught our attention.  To this day we feel the best upgrade you can make is the transition to an SSD (Solid-State Disk), as the HDD (Hard Disc Drive) has been the weakest link in all computers for years now. This year SSD technology has made some real headway in terms of pricing and performance. The cheapest model worth purchasing that we have tested to date is the OCZ Agility, and although the 120GB version still costs roughly $350 US today, it is considerably cheaper than most SSDs. For example, the next step up in the OCZ lineup is the Vertex, and the 120GB version of this product costs around 25% more at $440 US. The SSD market is now starting to become quite crowded and there are a number of 120/128GB capacity drives that are selling for under the $400 US mark. The new Patriot PS-100 is another example at $360, though the performance of this product is questionable based on what we have seen so far. This new SSD features the Phison PS3016 controller which is accompanied by a 64MB cache, though despite this the write performance appears very poor, especially when working with small files. Then there is also the Imation M-Class 27516 which can be had for $370, while the Corsair P128 is also available at $375. However most 120/128GB SSDs are selling for over $400 US, such as the Crucial M225 128GB which we reviewed a few months ago, this particular product is currently retailing for around $430 US. Given that SSD technology does have such a huge impact on PC performance, providing a cost effective alternative such as the OCZ Agility that does not sacrifice a great deal of performance is the ultimate goal. However since its arrival on June 9th 2009, the Agility has in our opinion provided consumers with the best performance vs. price ratio of any SSD. That said, on November 11th 2009 a new kind of budget SSD was announced by G.Skill and finally we are able to introduce you to the Falcon II. Like the OCZ Agility, the new G.Skill Falcon II utilizes the Indilinx Barefoot controller. However the Falcon II uses an updated version of the controller and is the first SSD to do so. The IDX110M01-LC, which is also called the Indilinx ECO controller, provides support for cheaper 34nm NAND flash memory. Keeping that in mind, let’s check out the new G.Skill Falcon II 128GB SSD in more detail... |
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