PhotoFast G-Monster-V5 256GB SSD Sneak Peek

There is a ton of activity in the solid state drive market, with new products announced seemingly on a weekly basis. One SSD product that generated some buzz out at Computex last month was the PhotoFast G-Monster-V5, due to its claimed 270MB/s read and write speeds. It wasn't available back then, however, we just got our hands on one for a quick evaluation and thought we'd give you a sneak peek at the goods.

We'll be doing a more thorough evaluation of this drive in the days ahead, but we wanted to show you some pictures and preliminary numbers to whet your appetites.

  

  

  
256GB PhotoFast G-Monster-V5 SSD

The drive you see here is a $999, 256GB PhotoFast G-Monster-V5. To an OS, the drive appears as a single volume, but internally the drive is comprised of a trio of components--two 128GB SSD modules and an adapter that "converts" the drive to a RAID 0 array. Each of the SSD modules is equipped with 128GB of Samsung MLC NAND flash memory, 64MB of Elpida cache memory (128MB total), and its own Indilinx controller.

As you can see from these HD Tach and ATTO benchmark results, the drive definitely puts up some impressive scores, in terms of reads and writes. According to ATTO, once the drive reached the 512K transfer size mark, it offers about 262MB/s reads and writes. And in the HD Tach test reads and writes are both in the 225 - 229MB/s range.

We'll be working with the drive for the next few days and will update you all with more information when we're done with our evaluation.