Test System Specs & File Copy Test

Core i7 Test System Specs
- Intel Core i7 920 (LGA1366)
- x3 2GB G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (CAS 9-9-9-24)
- Asus P6T Deluxe (Intel X58)
- OCZ GameXStream (700 watt)
- Seagate 500GB 7200-RPM (Serial ATA300)
- Asus GeForce GTX 285 (1GB)
Software
- Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate (64-bit)
- Nvidia Forceware 190.38

Please note that for testing purposes we first run each SSD through HD Tach's full disk benchmark, which fills the drive with a single contiguous file and thus forces a block rewrite for every successive write request. This was done to simulate the degradation problem that SSDs without the TRIM function are likely to face.

In our file copy test we took a single 6GB file and duplicated it on the drive, measuring the average transfer speed and time needed to complete. Right away we noticed that the internal transfer speeds of the G.Skill Falcon II 128GB were not all that impressive. With a throughput of just 57MB/s, the drive was around 33% slower than the Crucial M225, for example, and even more so when compared to the OCZ Agility 60GB.

We updated the Crucial M225 firmware to the latest version in order to get TRIM support and see how it affected performance. Despite testing with dirty drives the Crucial M225 actually saw a 16% drop in transfer speeds after the update. Unfortunately for G.Skill, it was still 26% faster than the Falcon II 128GB.