Tom's Hardware's Summer Guide: 17 SSDs Rounded Up

G.Skill Phoenix Pro (120 GB)

The Phoenix Pro is very similar to the regular Phoenix. Both are based on the SandForce SF-1200 controller. However, the Pro drive was optimized to be a a little faster here and there, and to maintain maximum performance on 4K random writes. As a matter of fact, its 31 500 I/O operations per second are close to what Crucial delivers with its 256 GB RealSSD C300, but 3x to 5x faster than the performance delivered by Indilinx-powered SSDs or Intel’s X25-M drives.

The Phoenix Pro is a fair bit faster on PCMark Vantage application tests than the non-Pro edition, and we measured marginally lower power consumption in most workload scenarios, as well. As a result, the Phoenix Pro not only beats the standard Phoenix when it comes to performance per watt, but it's also second-best in this overall rating, right after OCZ’s Vertex 2 drives, which are also based on the SF-1200 controller.

However, Intel and Toshiba are better at read performance per watt. Both are much lower on power consumption even though they don't deliver the same write performance, especially on 4K random writes.

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