G.Skill Phoenix Evo
G.Skill is another memory manufacturer that has diversified into SSD production. It has been a while since we tested one of the firm’s drives, but we are pleased to see it has come a long way since the JMicron-powered travesties of years gone by. At Micro Mart we are always happy to point our readers towards a bargain but SSDs are a product you shouldn’t skimp on. Early first-generation SSDs based on JMicron JM602 controllers often provide a worse experience than conventional hard disks, as concurrent read or write commands cause the controller to stall resulting in a perceptible pause to the user. You can buy these SSDs for peanuts second hand, but given their awful performance, inconsistent TRIM support and inability to cope with even light desktop work we can’t recommend them at any price.
The Phoenix Evo is another 2.5” drive finished in matt black. Like other drives in this test it comes with a 3.5” bracket allowing you to easily install it into your desktop PC. Handily G.Skill’s bracket has a number of installation mounts that allow you to align the drive in such a way to make it compatible with any case. Most brackets only allow you to install the drive in a single orientation, which can cause problems with cases that use caddies rather than screw-in supports to accommodate their 3.5” disks. G.Skill also provides you with a quick start user guide and mounting screws.
Under the Phoenix Evo’s hood lies the SandForce SF-1222 which has been coupled with 25nm NAND flash chips. The formatted capacity of the drive is 107GB which should be plenty to house your Windows 7 OS and a plethora of regularly used applications. In Atto we saw the drive approach the speeds quoted by G.Skill; a peak read transfer rate of a little over 280MB/s and a write speed of 270MB/s when transferring larger files. This would be considered lightning fast a few months ago but compared to the OCZ Vertex 3 it appears quite pedestrian.
Within PCMark Vantage the advantage of the Vertex 3 compared to its 3GBps peers drops, but OCZ’s flagship is still 50% quicker than the Phoenix Evo. A lot of the OCZ’s individual results are still well within the ~280MB/s limit of a SATA II controller, however, so the benefits provided by the SF-2281 go well beyond just a quicker storage interface.
Despite sporting the same controller, the G.Skill and the Corsair Force perform quite differently. In sequential reads the Phoenix Evo drive is faster, but when writing performance is considerably slower – this is another case of NAND chip choice and Firmware being just as important as the controller when it comes to overall performance.
Overall the G.Skill Force is a very solid product, but it isn’t the best SF-1200 based drive in our test. The Corsair Force is quicker overall and only costs a couple of pounds more for a higher capacity.
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