Introduction

G.Skill's first SandForce controlled SSD hit our lab prior to Computex and SandForce's MP2 update. With MP2 and Computex a couple of things happened. More companies were given the opportunity to use the high IOPS programming and consumer class over provisioning became mainstream.

The first SandForce SSD we tested, the Corsair Force, shipped to us with the 4K High IOPS programming and several other drives have come in since then. Some companies have made claims with the High IOPS programming while others simply use it as a box to check on their specifications list. For the most part, all have shared the same performance graphs but other than a couple of synthetic benchmarks we haven't found any real world performance increases from this special programming. With that in mind we aren't all that impressed with check boxes that don't equate to real world results.

The other major change that hit with MP2 was something that we could all use: more capacity available to the user. This was the feature that we were all excited about. Since SandForce designed their controller all of the available space for background tasks making the space available didn't impact performance unless the drive is nearly full. Even then, the drive is very fast but now users have the opportunity to fill that space with data.

G.Skill, building on the foundation of the Phoenix, now has their second revision available: the Phoenix Pro. There have been quite a few changes made to the Phoenix Pro; some of which we really like and others we didn't like with the first Phoenix.

Let's take a look at the changes that make the Phoenix Pro superior to the Phoenix and see what kind of performance we were able to get out of our sample.