Galax’s 120GB SSD packs potent performance

 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.

                                                                     The Galax controller with Heracles branding

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.

The Samsung 840 EVO 120GB drive. Data provided by Galax for this SSD

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 . 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.