G.SKILL Phoenix Blade 480GB PCIe SSD Review

CrystalDiskMark & Anvil IOPS

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 – Intel Z97 Platform

Benchmark Results: We didn’t quite see the 1900MB/s reads here but the writes were right on target. Either way, it blows away any SATA drive we’ve tested.

There’s a relatively new benchmark called Anvil Storage Utilities that is in beta but close to production. It’s a very powerful tool that measures performance through a variety of tests which can be customized. Since some of the tests more or less duplicate what we get from other benchmarks we use already, we decided to use the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) testing on 4kb file sizes at a queue depth of 32. IOPS performance is something SSD makers tout quite a bit but we generally don’t do a lot of IOPS testing because frankly a lot of users can’t relate to IOPS metrics as well and it tends to be more meaningful to the enterprise/server crowd. Still, it is another performance indicator with relevance and while some drives post good MB/s numbers, their IOPS scores aren’t always commensurate which this test will prove out.

Benchmark Results: We were kind of surprised that the write results here, while impressive in comparison to the other drives, is a far cry off of the rated specifications of 245K although the parameters of our test are different – specifically the queue depth of 32 whereas the spec likely came from QD128. Still, we thought it would be a bit higher at this setting. Reads exceeded the 90K specification by a fair margin.