PhotoFast G-Monster-V5 256GB SSD Sneak Peek

by Marco Chiappetta — Thursday, July 09, 2009, 08:05 PM EDT

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.

Tags: SSD, Storage, SATA, PhotoFast, monster, v5

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com