G.Skill Phoenix Blade (480GB) PCIe SSD Review
by Kristian Vättö on December 12, 2014 9:02 AM ESTFinal 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.
| Price Comparison (12/11/2014) | |
| 480/512GB | |
| G.Skill Phoenix Blade | $700 |
| OCZ RevoDrive 350 | $795 |
| Samsung XP941 | $510 |
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.
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MTEK - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Don't really care about a RAID-0 hack. Where are the SF-3700 based SSDs? Anand/Kingston were teasing us with one from last CES.... Where is it??counterclockwork - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
In case anyone is wondering, Kristian is wrong about the controller. SBC Designs has nothing to do with this thing, as if their website's lack of specifics and all-around amateurs-from-the-'90s look wasn't a big tip-off. Pure googling actually turns up Comay, and Comay is a brand used by CoreRise. In fact, the Phoenix Blade is nothing more than a rebadge of CoreRise's BladeDrive G24 (see http://www.corerise.com/en/product_show.php?id=95 ). Looking at the text strings in the driver for this confirms as much. As for the chip itself, CoreRise claims the SBC208 is their own proprietary device. Personally, I don't believe this, as their product portfolio doesn't otherwise suggest they have that level of expertise. I'd guess it's a LSI or Marvell controller.Kristian Vättö - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
Thanks for the heads up and detective work. I couldn't find anything in Google, but looks like I wasn't trying hard enough... Anyway, I've updated the article.StrongDC - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
The text says driven by four SandForce SF-2281 controllers while the table says 4x SandForce SF-2282. :)Kristian Vättö - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
Fixed :)SanX - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
Stop bending common sense with all that slow self-destructive flash junk and start making battery backuped RAM PCIe drives. Speeds will be 20x immediately and forever. RAM prices will drop with adoptionSanX - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
Battery and hard drive/flash backupFunBunny2 - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
Texas Memory (now, a unit of IBM) made such from 20 years ago; they were among the pioneers of SSD before NAND. Didn't sell all that well. Kind of expensive.Antronman - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
To be fair, that was 20 years ago.If anybody were interested, it might be $500 for an 80GB DDR3 storage drive. But honestly, nobody could utilize that sort of performance except for the largest and busiest data centers. And even they don't need it.
If you really want "teh supr speedi as f*ck spid" then you might as well just grab X79 or X99, and put in 64GBs of RAM and just ramdisk most of it.
incx - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
First of all you'd want proper ECC RAM on that thing, which will cost at least around $500 for the RAM only. In addition to that you'd want additional logic that will drive the whole thing, map and avoid bad chips, store stuff in flash (another cost) when power dies and resume it after, check and manage the flash, check and manage the battery and make it look like a "drive" in general. Then you add in the R&D costs, manufacturing, support and warranty costs etc and you're not even in the neighborhood any more.Creating a persistent RAM "disk" is not quite the same thing as software-mapping a bunch of consumer-grade RAM into a ramdisk. Sure, that works and is quite awesome, but everyone who uses it for anything decent, acknowledges and works around the risks that the data there may go poof or worse, bad, at any random time.