Conclusion

With the G-Monster V2 Photofast introduces an overall solid product which is compared to conventional hard drives an upgrade if you use the SSD to install the operating system on it. The internal RAID-0 architecture of the two JMicron controllers in B-revision does a good job.

The claimed throughput rates of 230 MByte/s reading and 160 MByte/s writing couldn't be reached in our test environment. As a maximum the SSD reached 167 MByte when sequentially reading and 72 MByte when sequentially writing. Under extremely optimized conditions we were able to score values above 200 MByte/s sequentially reading and 130 MByte/s sequentially writing. At the point we have to mention that these test were far from every day use.

As with the Apex which comes from OCZ the Photofast G-Monster V2's reading performance is on a high level. Unfortunately when writing 4 KByte blocks randomly the performance decreases massively. If we think of what's possible with the SSD technology there is still a lot of optimization potential. If the G-Monster V2 does massive multitasking it really starts struggling. But this seems to be down to the JMicron controller which comes with only a very small cache.

The Photofast G-Monster V2 is a solid performer and as a System disk a good upgrade to recent hard drives.

Authors: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch and m.seiler@ocaholic.ch