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

AnandTech Storage Bench 2011

Back in 2011 (which seems like so long ago now!), we introduced our AnandTech Storage Bench, a suite of benchmarks that took traces of real OS/application usage and played them back in a repeatable manner. The MOASB, officially called AnandTech Storage Bench 2011 – Heavy Workload, mainly focuses on peak IO performance and basic garbage collection routines. There is a lot of downloading and application installing that happens during the course of this test. Our thinking was that it's during application installs, file copies, downloading and multitasking with all of this that you can really notice performance differences between drives. The full description of the Heavy test can be found here, while the Light workload details are here.

The Phoenix Blade continues to be strong in our 2011 Storage Benches, although the XP941 retrieves its crown as the fastest client drive. I'm guessing the XP941 is more optimized for typical client workloads, which the 2011 suites present, whereas the 2013 workload is much, much heavier and only applies to users with very heavy IO workload.