G.Skill Phoenix Blade (480GB)

Review: G.Skill Phoenix Blade (480GB)

by Tarinder Sandhu on 21 November 2014, 09:00

Conclusion

...four SandForce controllers working in tandem with Toshiba NAND, straight-line performance is impressive.

Modern consumer SSDs are able to saturate the SATA 6Gbps interface introduced a few years ago and now available on practically every motherboard.

Advances such as SATA Express and full-bandwidth M.2 have yet to materialise en masse, leaving the door open for PCIe-based drives to tempt deep-pocketed enthusiasts.

The G.Skill Phoenix Blade is based on this thinking. Priced at £500-plus and outfitted with four SandForce controllers working in tandem with Toshiba NAND, straight-line performance is impressive, though, for lower overheads, we'd prefer it to use the standardised NVMe protocol.

Digger deeper into performance shows that, when compared to a fast SATA SSD, the Phoenix Blade excels in writing more than reading. There's certainly potential contained within the drive, but workloads need to be very specific in order to extract the most out of it.

The Good		The Bad
Excellent straight-line speed Fast at writing Cheaper than other PCIe drives		Single capacity Not NVMe-compatible

G.Skill Phoenix Blade 480GB

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The G.Skill Phoenix Blade 480GB is available at eBuyer.com.

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Not NVMe is a deal-breaker for PCIe SSDs.

Seems like a bit of an old-school mash together solution, not very elegant and quite power hungry.

Have used a couple of Plextor's M2 drives recently which they also sell on a PCI-E adaptor board and at just over £300 for 512GB they seem like a much better solution, not quite as fast but good enough for almost all uses and faster than a SATA drive.