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G.Skill Falcon II 64GB affordable SSD

by on12 February 2010

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As we have seen, the reading speeds are amazing and finally coming close to the SATA II specifications. While in RAID 0 mode it can be exceeded, that's why SATA 6Gbps has been introduced. The available solutions nowadays do nothing to improve the real speed, also the caches on the drives are too slow. In a month the first AMD boards with the new SB850 should appear which will have native SATA III support.

Write speed on this drive are just as fast as a hard drive, but that comes as no surprise, because this drive priced quite higher. The advantage you get for the extra investment comes down to the access time of just 0.11ms, which is 150x faster compared to a normal hard drive.

We installed Windows XP and Windows 7 on this SSD and it's really cool to see Wndows bootup in 10 to 15 seconds. To optimize the performance you should disable superfetch and limit write access as much as possible. In the GSkill forum you may find helpfull tips: http://www.gskill.us/forum/

While not cheap compared to normal hard drives, prices have gone down and this drive is available for about €153,-. If you need more space and a tad faster speeds the 128GB version is yours for €264,-. Drives capable of writing as fast as reading will cost you at least double their price.

With reading speed of about 230MB/s and writing speed of about 120MB/s the drive offers great performance. Compared to a normal harddrive it's much faster. With fast access times, low power consumption of about 2.7W and noiseless operation the drive is very attractive.

We have to congratulate G.Skill for their effort to bring this affordable drive to the masses. This drive makes a difference and we can recommend it.

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Last modified on 24 September 2010
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