G Skill Falcon – Installation/First Impressions/Unboxing
Hey guys,
As you know, yesterday I got my new drive, the Falcon, for my new PC.
At the moment, I haven’t got the rest of the pieces of the PC, so I have installed it in my current machine.
Anyway, lets get right into the unboxing.
When I first got the box, I thought it was pretty boring looking, and could’ve done with a bit more information on the box, but I think the design is starting to grow on me.
Specs and stuff
As you can see, it’s rated at 230MB read and 190MB write, and can operate at 40 degrees below 0!
Box opened up and pulled out
And you unfold that to get..
Drive and Manual
The drive comes in an anti-static bag, for safety, and the manual contains detailed specs, warranty information, and instructions for installing your drive for use.
Firmware jumper in a zip lock bag
The last thing the drive comes with is a jumper to use when upgrading the firmware on the drive, it’s fairly obvious where to put the jumper, but I have no idea how to upgrade it yet, when I figure it out, I’ll let you’s know, and post a How to.
Mmmm... Nice!
And finally, here’s the drive by itself. As soon as I lifted it out of the bag, I noticed it was light, really light, like less than half the weight of a standard 3.5″ HDD. The case is made of some type of metal.
As you can see, the same design from the front of the box was carried over directly over to a sticker on the drive.
I forgot to get a picture of the underside of the drive before installing it, but it’s mainly specs and serial numbers and stuff, nothing too interesting. Don’t be afraid to ask if you want a picture of it though.
Drive installed in my mess, after removing my old failing drive
And finally, I installed it, even though it wasn’t much of an installation, because I didn’t have an adapter to fit the drive into a normal hard drive space.
The Falcon, and all other SSDs are 2.5″ drives, the size of a Laptop hard drive, and Desktop HDDs are 3.5″, so SSDs don’t fit in a Desktop PC without adjustment or a holder.
So.. Instead, I put it on the floor of my case xD.
In this photo, you can see the size of the drive aswell, it’s almost smaller than my CPU fan, so it’s pretty tiny.
Once installed, I started installing Windows 7 RC, while this was installling, me and my brothers had a bit of fun out in the street.
Brother riding on an old chair
Aand.. He's off
Yeaaah. Well I didn’t get to have too much fun, because.. Win7 installed and booted for the first time in UNDER 15 minutes.
After using the drive for a day now, I’ve found that the computer boots and logs in in 15 seconds from power on, it’s SPEEDY!
While we’re on SPEED! Here’s my first run with CrystalDiskMark.
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CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
————————————————–
Sequential Read : 238.390 MB/s
Sequential Write : 149.820 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 179.021 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 137.213 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 30.746 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 19.177 MB/s
Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2009/07/09 16:18:19
That is faster than the speed indicated in the specs for Reading, but for writing it is slightly slower, but still very fast.
This was a day after I installed the OS, and I haven’t done anything to try and optimize the OS for SSD use except for moving the pagefile to a different drive.
I’m going to run G Skill’s Wiper tool when they activate my account on their forum to download their firmware and tools, and that should get me some extra speed in the benchmark area.
Just as a comparison, my other hard drive (a cheap drive that you get when speed doesn’t matter, and that most computers come with), got about a 6th of these results.
So yeah… Speed, loving it!
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for a howto for updating firmware, and optimizing Windows for SSDs.
-Aaron
PS. Don’t buy Western Digital hard drives. The old drive that failed was just over a year old, and was used under normal conditions, and cared for imensely, even though it was extremely noisy.
Failure, and ugly too now that I've seen the Falcon!
PPS. If you’ve got an idea for demolition of the old drive, swing me an email or tweet and I might have a go at it lol.
