G.Skill Phoenix Blade How much are you willing to pay for performance?

Available in 480GB (as tested) or 960GB fl avours, the Phoenix Blade was launched late last year to bring high-end performance to your PCIe slot. The half-height drive doesn’t use M.2 at all, so it’s relegated to desktop use. Like the OCZ RevoDrive, the Blade uses a PCIe to SATA controller, essentially running four SSDs in RAID 0 on the board. Each of the four 128GB banks use Toshiba MLC NAND coupled to a SandForce SF-2281 controller. The whole kit and caboodle is covered by an aluminium heatsink to keep the components cool while handling your data. The result is a sleek PCIe 2.0 x8 SSD that offers high-end speed, albeit with a hefty $999 price tag. In testing the Phoenix Blade offered excellent sequential read and write speeds of 1,825/989MB/s, besting the more expensive RevoDrive. Still, the G.Skill is still slower and more expensive per gigabyte than the more advanced Intel PCIe setup. Random 4K read and writes are worse than the better competing M.2 PCIe drives, at 25/91MB/s, respectively. The Blade is rated for 90,000/245,000 read write IOPS, which is quite good. The Phoenix is rated for a massive 1.4TB of data written per day over the three-year warranty period. This fi gure is actually very important because for those who need to write a lot of data, the Blade is a clear winner. You can also pick up the G.Skill SSD in a 960GB version for $1,649.