The Place to Be!

Here are some quick Xbench results comparing the WD Black to the G.Skill Falcon in my Hackintosh. The overall disk scores were WD Black: 78.93 vs Falcon: 315.82. You can see the individual read/write scores below, but if you want the Cliff’s Notes version…the Falcon puts the smack down!

WD Black 500GB:
Results 78.93
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.7 (9J61)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model SomeModel
Drive Type WDC WD5001AALS-00L3B2 WDC WD5001
Disk Test 78.93
Sequential 141.14
Uncached Write 151.09    92.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 146.91    83.12 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 105.14    30.77 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 185.05    93.00 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 54.78
Uncached Write 18.14    1.92 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 291.30    93.26 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 112.53    0.80 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 179.61    33.33 MB/sec [256K blocks]

G.Skill Falcon 128GB:
Results 315.82
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.7 (9J61)
Physical RAM 4096 MB
Model SomeModel
Drive Type G.SKILL FALCON 128GB SSD G.SKILL FALC
Disk Test 315.82
Sequential 271.22
Uncached Write 380.85    233.84 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 378.63    214.23 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 137.15    40.14 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 456.59    229.48 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 377.98
Uncached Write 127.67    13.52 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 700.80    224.35 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 3161.37    22.40 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 993.55    184.36 MB/sec [256K blocks

-D

The G.Skill Falcon arrived today and I got a little bit of play time with it. I’ll do more on it later, but for now here are some first impressions. First, it comes excellently packaged. It’s a 2.5 incher, so it’s nice and light and compact. Installation is a breeze, just like any other drive. Oh…and it’s freakin’ fast! Yeah, for real. I only did a couple of time trials, but as you’ll see it impresses.
The drive I was using as my OS drive in the Hackintosh is a 500GB 7200RPM WD Black with 32MB cache. Great drive (I use a 640GB WD Black in my PowerMac…both have been solid.) I didn’t have time to really dig in for benchmarks so I just chose to time booting and a couple of big, slow loading apps to time. Results were as follows:

WD Black
Boot Time: 25 seconds from boot loader to desktop
Photoshop CS4: 9 seconds (that surprised me)
Xcode: 6 seconds.

G.Skill Falcon SSD
Boot Time: 16 seconds from boot loader to desktop
Photoshop CS4: 3 seconds
Xcode: 2 seconds

Big improvements!! Those are the slow loaders, normal apps like Safari, iCal etc load pretty much instantaneously. This system was already fairly quick and responsive for most tasks, but with the SSD I can tell that things run smoother and, as the numbers above attest, load times are dramatically faster. Now, if I can just swing another one somehow so I can get some RAID 0 action going

-D

After a few weeks of trying to talk myself in to some SSD sweetness for the Hackintosh I finally broke down this morning and ordered a G.Skill Falcon 128GB SSD. I was going back and forth between the Corsair P128, the OCZ Vertex and Falcon and was leaning towards the Falcon. When I checked Newegg this morning (my 50th time there since Friday) I saw that they dropped 10 bucks off of the price and that pushed me over the edge. I’ll put some vids up of the speed increases when I get everything set up. In the meantime, this vid does a great job of showing just how fun SSDs are:

-D