G.SKILL Phoenix Blade 480GB PCIe SSD Review

[Apoptosis]

Based out of Taiwan and founded in 1989, G.SKILL is best known for their memory products and over the years they’ve sprinkled in some other related products as well. Though they haven’t been very prominent in the SSD market – especially as of late, G.SKILL has remained in the game with yet another Phoenix drive release. They’ve been using the ‘Phoenix’ appellation on their SSD product names for quite some time and to the best of my memory, the last one we tested was the Phoenix Pro way back in 2010. That particular drive featured the (pre-LSI owned) SandForce SF-1222 controller and operated on a SATA II interface. Now that newly minted SATA II SSDs are a thing of the past and SATA III drives are routinely hitting bandwidth thresholds, we’re seeing more and more PCIe based drives emerge which have plenty of ceiling left to grow. G.SKILL has surprisingly joined the growing PCIe crowd with the Phoenix Blade. The name is likely a reference to the drive’s shape, long and thin, and the fact that it carves up data with ease. This time around, they have a on board RAID 0 setup (à la OCZ RevoDrive 350) with four LSI SandForce SF-2281 controllers working in concert to pump out crazy performance like 2000MB/s reads/writes and IOPS of up to 90,000 reads and 245,000 writes.




Article Title: G.SKILL Phoenix Blade 480GB PCIe SSD Review
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/g-skill-pho ... iew_154013
Pricing At Time of Print: $699.99 Shipped

[Calamar]

Nice review.

First,
I would like to make a suggestion for another drives review test: Windows Seach speed. For a folder with 100k to 400k files (lets say), with subfolders, not indexed. Time to find files for a given match. This would be a "real scenario" test. Can be recorded with a high-speed camera to obtain precise results. The number of files suggested is to make it able to extend it to future super-fast drives.

Second,
I've only seen reviewd Revo 350 (OCZ, now toshiba) and musking scorpion deluxe, in a couple of trusty sites. It would be nice to have them tested here too.

Third,
PCI-E storage via M2 or whatever is the near future for super-fast drives. People with M2 pci-e compatible boot capability will not get enough with a simple drive on their M2 slot, but will fastly move to RAID0 of 2 or 4 drives via a pcie-adapter with a decent controller/s (not that marvell POS) to get 4GB/s transfers and 400k iops @ 4k. Please keep an eye on those cards!

[FZ1]

First,
I would like to make a suggestion for another drives review test: Windows Seach speed. For a folder with 100k to 400k files (lets say), with subfolders, not indexed. Time to find files for a given match. This would be a "real scenario" test. Can be recorded with a high-speed camera to obtain precise results. The number of files suggested is to make it able to extend it to future super-fast drives.

Thanks for the suggestion but the seek times are so ridiculously fast that you 'd be looking at fractions of seconds difference which is pretty meaningless in the real world.

Second,
I've only seen reviewd Revo 350 (OCZ, now toshiba) and musking scorpion deluxe, in a couple of trusty sites. It would be nice to have them tested here too.

Like THIS? It's not referenced in this latest review because the testing on it was done on a previous test bench so the results wouldn't be directly comparable. We also recently did this one. We don't always get to keep the hardware to use in future testing and it's a long process to go back and regression test previous drives whenever we do a bench update.

Third,
PCI-E storage via M2 or whatever is the near future for super-fast drives. People with M2 pci-e compatible boot capability will not get enough with a simple drive on their M2 slot, but will fastly move to RAID0 of 2 or 4 drives via a pcie-adapter with a decent controller/s (not that marvell POS) to get 4GB/s transfers and 400k iops @ 4k. Please keep an eye on those cards!

I'm looking forward to getting some quality M.2 pci-e cards...there are very few available now and not all motherboards support the M.2 PCI-E protocol.