We haven’t done a lot of SSD coverage of late at ET, but Galax (formerly Galaxy) has a free SSD deal going that some of you may find useful. Review time has been a bit squeezed of late (with Jamie out on paternity leave I’ve been holding down the fort as writer, editor, and reviewer). The company is currently running a decent-looking bundle — buy a GTX 970 OC and get a 120GB SSD packed in with it. The SSD isn’t free, since the current bundle costs $80 more than just the GPU, but it offered an opportunity to take a look at the drive — and if you’re in the market for a new SSD and graphics card at the same time, the combo might still prove useful.
The SSD in question is based on Jmicron’s Heracles controller, but it’s not clear which iteration of the Jmicron hardware is used here. The controller is officially branded as a Jmicron Heracles, but it’s not clear if this refers to the JMF811 custom controller that Galax showed at the beginning of the year, or if it’s a rebranded Jmicron JMF667H. The photo below identifies the chip as a custom GXH1001, but that part number doesn’t shed much light on the architecture’s origins.
One feature of the drive that Galax is calling out is its support for what it called SLC Cache Auto Release. According to the company, SLC Cache Autorelease “streamlines the data pipeline and prevents cache bottlenecks. This effectively eliminates the performance drops prevalent in competing drives and lets the GALAX Gamer maintain maximum speed indefinitely.” Galax wasn’t able to provide further details on how the technology works, but it sounds similar to the Dynamic Write Caching that Micron deploys on its drives. To put it simply: Many manufacturers use a pool of SLC memory to ensure higher performance. Dynamically allocating that pool, rather than statically sizing it for a certain amount of NAND in particular locations, allows for better overall flexibility and helps keep a drive running quickly.
According to Galax, the Gamer SSD family can maintain higher transfer rates even when the drive is nearly completely full as compared to other drives, which see more dramatic performance fall-offs in this state.
We can’t confirm the 840 EVO’s performance — we don’t have a 120GB 840 EVO drive to test against — but can confirm that the Galax 120GB’s performance remains fairly consistent, even when the drive is nearly full.
Test results
We benchmarked the Galax 120GB SSD on our Core i7-4790K testbed using an Asus Z97-Deluxe motherboard and 8GB of DDR3-2133. While that’s a bit overkill for a modest SSD, it let us keep continuity with drives we’d tested in the past. Unfortunately, since it has been awhile since we did SSD testing, and 120GB models aren’t the kind of hardware most companies are sampling these days, it’s a bit hard to come up with comparison models. We’ve had to settle for blowing the dust off a few larger drives from 2013 and 2014.
In theory, this could have left the Galax drive at a disadvantage, since smaller drives sometimes have fewer memory channels and lower overall performance. In practice, it turned out not to matter much, and while time prevented us from doing more than touching on the drive’s overall performance, detailed synthetic results are available at Overclockers.com. We elected to test the drive in both PCMark 7 and PCMark 8. Both of these applications contain real-world storage traces that were designed to replicate performance in a variety of real-world tasks and scenarios.
PCMark 7 shows the Galax performing quite well against the competition. PCMark 8 also includes its own storage tests, with updated workloads and a different application mix, so we threw that in as well. Does the relatively svelte 120GB Galax keep up with larger drives? Necessity forced us to swap out the comparisons here, cutting down the pool to AMD’s Radeon R7 and the older Crucial m500.
In a word, yes. The Galax 120GB SSD is surprisingly spry on its feet, turning in results that mirror what larger and more advanced drives are able to return in common workloads. PCMark 8 tends to compress drive performance even more than PCMark 7, which is one reason we used the “raw” storage scores in that application, but the synthetic test results we linked above show a very narrow gap between the Galax 120G and other SSDs, even in serial tests.
Is 120GB enough?
Four or five years ago, the smart thing to do was to buy a small SSD (60-80GB) and use that for your OS and a few key programs, while still keeping most of your data on traditional HDDs. These days, you can buy a 250GB SSD for what those 60-80GB units cost back then, which makes a 120GB drive a bit of a tough sell — especially since modern games are easily eating 40-50GB apiece. Given these factors, it’s hard to recommend a 120GB as a primary OS drive.
For those of you who might want a secondary, game-specific SSD or want to upgrade an older system, however, it’s not a bad deal and the Galax 120GB SSD is a solid drive. Galax’s current offer will drop a GTX 970 OC in your pocket along with the accompanying SSD for $409. For an overclocked card (the GPU is clocked at 1266MHz, up from 1050MHz base), the combo is pretty good. It’s also nice to see smaller drives keeping pace with larger ones — there was a time when smaller SSDs often performed significantly worse than the faster drives of the same capacity.
