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...

The G.Skill specification for the Falcon II 128GB drive states that the read performance will be “up to” 220MB/s and the write 150MB/s. Something worth noting is that the claimed read and write performance is lower than that of the original Falcon.

G.Skill says this is because the Falcon II ships with the latest Indilinx v1819 firmware which enables the TRIM function. Apparently this does slow the drives down a little, though it should preserve the advertised performance, where as SSDs without the TRIM function enabled will likely suffer from a serious performance hit over time as the drives become full.

Where the OCZ Agility and the new Falcon II really differ is in the NAND flash chips that they use. The Agility features Intel 29F64G08FAMCI chips, where as the Falcon II uses Intel 29F16B08JAMDB (34nm) chips, which evidently cost less. Both do however feature the same Elpida 64MB cache memory chip.

G.Skill also claims that the Falcon II has a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 1.5 million hours. This is the same estimation that they gave their original Falcon series, and it seems to be somewhat of a standard for these MLC drives. Additionally, G.Skill claims that the drive will withstand 1500G shock resistance.

The Falcon II SSDs measure 99.8 x 69.63 x 9.3mm and weigh just 77 grams, thanks to their slim 2.5" design, making them ideal for both desktop and laptop computers. They are said to use just 2 watts of power when in use and just 0.5 watts when in standby. The Falcon II SSDs are designed to work in RAID if you choose to purchase more than one, and they are backed by a 2-year warranty.

Hardware - Intel Core i7 920 (LGA1366) - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 9-9-9-24) - G.Skill Falcon II 128GB - Crucial M225 128GB - Corsair P Series 128GB - OCZ Agility 120GB - ASUS GeForce GTX 285 (1GB) - ASUS P6T Deluxe (Intel X58) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit) - Nvidia Forceware 190.38

Please note that when testing we first run each SSD through HD Tach’s full disk benchmark, which fills the drive with a single contiguous file. This test is useful as it fills all of the flash pages, which forces a block rewrite for every successive write request. This simulates the SSD degradation problem that drives without the TRIM function are likely to face.

When it comes to maximum throughput the G.Skill Falcon II is not all that impressive, as it was roughly 13% slower than the OCZ Agility, and 21% slower than the Crucial M225. However this is not necessarily a bad thing, as the Corsair P128 is by far the fastest SSD in this test, though when it comes to overall performance this SSD is not very impressive, suffering from poor small write performance. Therefore, while the G.Skill Falcon II may not shine when displaying top end performance, we are hoping it can impress us when measuring small write performance.

The first CrystalDiskMark test measures sequential read/write performance. As you can see, the G.Skill Falcon II is not all that impressive when measuring write performance, as we find it to be 24% slower than the OCZ Agility. The read performance on the other had is very good, matching the other SSDs.

The G.Skill Falcon II continues to struggle, as it trails the OCZ Agility by a 25% performance margin in the random 512KB write test. Again the read performance is very good, but we are being let down by weak write performance.

Interestingly, the random 4KB test saw the G.Skill Falcon II match the write performance of the OCZ Agility, while it was able to deliver an impressive 72% performance boost when measuring read performance. In fact, while the write performance was on par with the other SSDs in this test, the read performance of the G.Skill Falcon II was far superior.

Hardware - Intel Core i7 965 Extreme Edition (Overclocked @ 3.70GHz) - x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 9-9-9-24) - Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300) - AMD Radeon HD 6870 (1GB) - AMD Radeon HD 5970 (2GB) - AMD Radeon HD 5870 (1GB) - HIS Radeon HD 5850 (1GB) - AMD Radeon HD 5830 (1GB) - HIS Radeon HD 5770 (1GB) - HIS Radeon HD 5750 (1GB) - Inno3D GeForce GTX 480 (1.5GB) - Palit GeForce GTX 470 (1.3GB) - Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 (1GB) - Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 (768MB) - Palit GeForce GTS 450 (1GB) - Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58) Software - Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit - Nvidia Forceware 258.96 WHQL - Nvidia Forceware 260.89 - AMD Catalyst 10.9 - AMD Catalyst 10.10a

According to 3Dmark Vantage the Radeon HD 6870 is now the fourth fastest graphics card available while it is also the third fastest single GPU graphics card. The Radeon HD 6870 was placed just ahead of the Radeon HD 5850 at all three resolutions while it was considerably slower than the Radeon HD 5870.

The above HD Tach Pro results show the random read performance and again this is something that the G.Skill Falcon II does exceptionally well. The Falcon II was the fastest tested SSD right across the board, and in many cases left the OCZ Agility far behind.

The G.Skill Falcon II is extremely fast in the 512 bytes, 4KB and 64KB tests, where it left the OCZ Agility well behind. The Agility did eventually catch up with better top end performance, overtaking the Falcon II once file sizes reached 1MB. Still, while the Agility lead the Falcon II by a 20% margin in the 1MB test, the Falcon II was 76% faster than the Agility in the 64KB test, and 4x faster for the 4KB test.

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.

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Reviewed By Steven Walton