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In terms of performance the G.Skill Falcon II did not exactly impress us right off the bat, as it displayed rather poor file copying performance due to its limited top-end performance. When measuring write performance we struggled to achieve a throughput of 130MB/s with the Falcon II, despite the fact that G.Skill claim that it’s good for 150MB/s. Still, while top-end speed is nice, it’s the low-end performance that makes all the difference, especially for those wanting to run programs and even the operating system from their SSD. The random 4KB write performance was spectacular and HD Tune Pro showed the Falcon II to be 4x faster than the OCZ Agility, which is quite incredible. In fact, there were a few tests were the Falcon II came out on top of the pack, beating quite a few impressive SSDs. That said, the Falcon II is not intended to set any new speed records, and in fact quite the opposite is true. Instead of trying to develop another high-speed expensive MLC based SSD, the idea was to create something that performed well and didn’t break the bank. This was the same basis upon which OCZ developed the Agility and that product has been a real success.  Although we cannot find any US retailers offering the Falcon II just yet, it is listed at Australian and Canadian online retailers, and already appears to be around 15% cheaper than the original. How much this will change as availability picks up is anyone’s guess. Furthermore, based on our best estimates the Falcon II should just undercut the Agility by $10 or so for the 120/128GB capacity. It is also worth mentioning that the G.Skill Falcon II 128GB is roughly 22% cheaper than the Crucial M225. The Falcon II 128GB is also 33% cheaper than the Intel X25-M G2 160GB, while it is 22% more expensive than the 80GB version, though you do get 60% more storage space with the 128GB drive. As it stands the Falcon II is now the cheapest way to get your hands on an Indilinx based SSD and that’s pretty special. As far as the new firmware goes, we do not believe this is responsible for any real performance losses, as the Crucial M225 with the updated firmware turned out more often than not faster. Again we were trying to simulate used SSD performance by first filling each drive with a single contiguous file before benchmarking. So with TRIM active there is a good chance the Crucial M225 v1819 configuration was going to deliver better performance.
Reviewed By Steven Walton |
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