G.Skill Phoenix Blade (480GB) PCIe SSD Review

Final Words

The Phoenix Blade is a beast in performance. It's in the top two of all the client-level SSDs that we have ever tested and trades blows with Samsung's XP941 PCIe SSD (although I must say here that most of the client drives we have tested are SATA based, so the Phoenix Blade with its PCIe 2.0 x8 interface and four SF-2282 controllers in RAID 0 is obviously at an advantage). However, that doesn't necessarily dictate the drive's performance, especially outside synthetic benchmarks, because as we learned in the RevoDrive 350 review, a PCIe SSD isn't always faster than a good SATA 6Gbps SSD.

Comparing the RevoDrive 350 to the Phoenix Blade is actually very interesting: while the two share the same core (4x SF-2282), the Phoenix Blade is considerably faster in all our benchmarks. It's hard to point at the SBC controller given how little we know and the lack of information available, but most likely the RAID controller and its firmware are to thank for the performance as the SF-2282 controller and firmware are essentially the same for all vendors. I have to say I'm impressed with what G.Skill has been able to put out with its first ever PCIe SSD because OCZ has a long history of building PCIe designs. 

Better yet, the price is nearly $100 lower than what the RevoDrive 350 sells for, but on the other hand that's still almost $200 more than the 512GB XP941. As a result the XP941 will remain as my recommentation for users that have compatible setups (PCIe M.2 and boot support for the XP941) because I'd say it's slightly better performance wise for typical client workloads and at $200 less there is just no reason to choose the Phoenix Blade over the XP941, except for compatibility.

This is ultimately the niche for the Phoenix Blade. Since XP941 boot support is mostly limited to motherboards with the Z97 chipset, there is a market for users with older motherboards where the XP941 is simply not an option due to the lack of boot support. The Phoenix Blade features legacy drivers that load before the BIOS, so it can be selected as the boot device in practically any motherboard. As such it's currently the best option for people who don't have an Z97 system but want fast 'all-in-one' PCIe SSD storage. (Another option would be a PCIe RAID card with SATA 6Gbps SSDs in RAID 0, but that requires more set up and management.) It comes at a cost, but the users who need/want a drive with such high performance and fall into the non-Z97 niche shouldn't find the price overwhelming.