performance is right up there at 245K.
Power consumption at load is lower than
what we find with the INTEL unit at 18W
(max) but that is to be expected with the
lower capacity as well. As for endurance,
G.Skill states that it is capable of 1.4TB
a day, at face value, significantly higher
than what INTEL offers, but with that the
warranty is only three years. So obviously
there are some conditions which apply to
that, or how endurance is measured isn’t
the same.
In case you’re wondering, the Phoenix
Blade, does come in a 960GiB model as
well for those who feel that 480GiB just
isn’t enough. Understandable, given that
games such as GTA V, come in at a hefty
65GiB. With video ever growing in size
courtesy of 60fps media, 4K content or
both - 480GiB can vanish fairly quickly,
thus it is only natural that G.Skill has
what is essentially a 1TB unit as well. This
drive at worst performs just as well as
the 480GiB model, but in reality is slightly
faster, at least in synthetic testing.
Physically, the Phoenix Blade, looks
great or as well as this kind of thing can.
It isn’t something you’ll see in your PC
often, if at all, but one can appreciate the
heat sink cover that G.Skill has used to
make for a visually appealing PCIe card.
The cover has a mesh opening and the
G.Skill Phoenix logo on it. You’ll find no
fancy LED lights here as is the trend lately,
however there are lights located at the
back of the card, which indicate power
good and “busy” signal. You’re unlikely to
ever see these, but they may be useful for
diagnostic purposes.
Beneath the bulky Heat sink are two
PCBs which are sandwiched together each
housing a couple of SF-2282 controllers
and the respective NAND chips. These
PCB’s are joined together via a short, high
speed 23-pin connector which naturally
24 The OverClocker Issue 34 | 2015
“IN ONE FELL SWOOP, THE
INTRODUCTION OF DESKTOP SSDS
YEARS AGO, RENDERED HIGH 10K AND
15K RPM WORKSTATION/SERVER CLASS
DISKS REDUNDANT.”
facilitates communication between the
two boards. As with most drives in this day
and age that seek to be competitive. The
Phoenix Blade is bootable with just about
all operating systems (at least Microsoft
operating systems from Windows 7
onwards). Your PC should be able to
recognize the drive immediately and you
can install your OS on it without needing
to load any driver. With that, there’s also
TRIM support for the drive so that should
take care of performance consistency to
some degree.
As we are essentially dealing with
a RAID solution here, the immediate
question from potential buyers would
be why not just opt for a traditional RAID
setup and save yourself plenty of money
while you’re at it? The issue here as that
with a RAID setup, at least one via your
motherboard’s storage controller comes
down to performance. Even the fastest
SATA 6GBps drives in tandem will not give
you’re the sequential performance that the
Phoenix Blade can deliver. Two SAMSUNG
850 Pro 250GiB drives would certainly
give you the matching capacity, but would
even in theory be limited to under 1.2GiB/s.
What about three drives you say, well, that
in theory does give you 1.8GiB/s which
is higher than what was measured at
1.71GiB/s for the Phoenix Blade (mainly
focusing on read performance here),
but that is just a theoretical limit and
in practice it won’t be anywhere near
that. Given that 4K performance doesn’t
necessarily scale with RAID-0 and in
certain context not at all, it’s just not
feasible to come to this exact capacity, at
this performance at a competitive price.
This will certainly change in future, but
as it stands, barring M.2 drives (which
will not always have more than 10Gbps/s
bandwidth on all boards), there aren’t
many ways in which you may undercut
the solution that G.Skill has provided via a
similarly configured RAID-0 system.
Moreover, there is also the admin of
making your RAID setup bootable and
it not moving with you from system to
system should you upgrade. Granted
that most people do not upgrade that
frequently for this to be of any concern,
it does however pose several challenges
which are otherwise not an issue for the
Phoenix Blade. As such the pricing may
seem steep, but you should really think
about it past just the monetary value vs.
the capacity.
In testing, this drive delivered alright.
While the numbers you see are far from
what G.Skill claim, it is important to
note that testing of SSD’s in any specific
environment is going to vary from what
the manufacturer claims. More times than
not the measured performance is lower,