G.Skill Falcon II 128GB (FM-25S2I-128GBF2)

Zitat: The Falcon 2 is clearly a very capable drive then, and actually manages to surpass the “vanilla” Barefoot Indilinx drive’s performance in a number of areas, especially when it comes to sequential read and write speeds which are notably faster. While there are some other minor differences, particularly in random read and write performance, on the balance of things it’s fair to say that this cut-price version actually offers superior performance, albeit in our purely synthetic benchmarks. One cause for concern however is the fact that G.Skill lacks the level of firmware support of a full Indilinx partner, and while the company is faster than many of the other Indilinx drive makers in deploying firmware updates, they have to date all been destructive updates requiring the use of a drive jumper and a second OS install to perform the update – not ideal at all. Firmware issues have lessened a little now the updates have matured though, helped in the majority by the vital addition of TRIM support and we can see from our testing that there’s no desperate need for an urgent update to the Falcon 2. Realistically the Indilinx Barefoot drive controller has likely reached its peak following twelve months of updates so we doubt there will be many new versions forthcoming now anyway. All of which leaves the Falcon 2 in a very attractive position. With a £40 price advantage over Samsung NAND-based Indilinx Barefoot drives, superior performance in a number of areas and a retail firmware that’s more than up to scratch so long as you’re using the drive in a single drive configuration in Windows 7 (realistically the only way we’d recommend using any SSD right now), it ticks all the boxes we’re looking for from an SSD. The only concern is the imminent arrival of the next generation of SSD drive controllers, but as these will carry an inevitable price premium (and in the case of the new Sandforce drives, will offer markedly lower formatted capacities) there’s still room in the market for a lower priced option. If only NAND pricing were to fall a decent amount to make a “lower priced” SSD cost less than what is still a very pricey £260 we’d really see some fireworks but for now the Falcon2 is a capable, cheaper and most importantly very fast addition to the SSD market and is more than worthy of a recommendation.