G.Skill FM-25S2-128GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk

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[mwaschkowski]

Re: G.Skill FM-25S2-128GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk

Hi,

Thanks very much for the review, I'm very interested in SSD drives for my laptop. There have been issues in the past because of bad controllers on the SSD drives. see:
AnandTech: Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives)
What controller does this drive use?

Thanks!

Mark

PS. I'm extremely keen to see how this drive fares vs the Intel x25, any idea when that review will be done?

[chrisram]

Re: G.Skill FM-25S2-128GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk

The Intel X25-M will be finished shortly. I can tell you now that the Intel SSD is much faster...but it also costs 2-3x more.

[mwaschkowski]

Re: G.Skill FM-25S2-128GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk

OK, cool, can't wait to see that one.

Do you know what kind of controller the gskill uses? It may be a good choice for me to save some money and still get better HD performance...

Thanks,

Mark

[chrisram]

Re: G.Skill FM-25S2-128GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk

I am not exactly sure which controller is used on any of these drives. I have some meetings planned at CES that will get me up to speed on controllers.

[allen.g]

Re: G.Skill FM-25S2-128GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk

Chris, thanks for the review. I was about to cancel a purchase of this same drive until I came upon this article. Can you comment on any tweaks, if any, for Vista64? Specifically, I'm thinking about the OCZ recommended tweaks such as turning off prefetching, disable indexing, putting the paging file on another drive, etc.

Thanks,
Allen

[chrisram]

Re: G.Skill FM-25S2-128GB 2.5-inch Solid State Disk

With the way these drives are tested most of those tweaks do not apply since I am not booting off of the test drive.

I am in the process of testing the OCZ recommended tweaks on a boot drive in a spare notebook. To be honest this article is going to be a little ways out since I have several in line before it. To summerize my findings to date, the tweaks work as long as you are experienced enough to perform them.

Next week, at least before December I will have an article published that shows how we test hard drives and a break down of each component in the system that explains why that piece was chosen. The article also going into the exact testing procedures used with a video of each test in action. I really wanted to get that article published before we started publishing the hard drive reviews based on the new system but the last component will not be here until next week.

I have went through several cases with this workstation build. The first was the Stacker 830 with a bunch of HD sleds and backplanes but the inside felt cramped with the Tyan S2515-E installed and all of those SATA cables. The next case I used and am still using until the new case arrives is the Lian-Li V2000. The V2000 is a real beauty of a case but the drives are all on the bottom and to put a new one in meants taking the side off. My V2000 is also silver so there was no way I was going to put a bunch of black HD trays in her. She will go back to phase change duty with my Mach II GT installed.

The third and hopefully final case is the Xclio-1000.

Xclio-1000-spec

I am hoping this case has the cooling power to keep the Opterons cool and not be loud enough to where I can't run it 24/7. The feature that won me over though was the built in drive sleds and backplane. They are going to fill it up with drive carriers so I don't have to pop the side open several times a day to make cabling changes.

If that doesn't work then I am just going to break down and get a 4u with 20 sleds. I cringe thiniing how loud the 80mm fans are going to be.

4U Rackmount 20 x SATA SAS Hot Swap Server Chassis NEW - eBay (item 400009631650 end time Nov-22-08 18:17:26 PST)

I plan on doing a lot of HD reviews, maybe as many as 4 per month. I just finished testing the 8 Seagate 15K.6 drives were sent to me. The testing literally lasted two weeks. If I was awake I was in the computer room and if I was in the computer room those drives were doing something. The article will have 20 test groups. RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 drives for each RAID configuration that is allowed for the drive number. Formatting RAID on 8 450 GB drives in RAID 5 and 6 takes quite a bit of time but running it in RAID 0 for a few hours is priceless.