March 29, 2024

Welcome to another episode of TechARX Tech Report. Today we will be testing an SSD from the house of GALAX with the new PHISON PS3111-S11 controller.

Presenting the GALAX GAMER SSD L 120GB.


This SSD is and update to the Gamer Lineup of mainstream SSD’s from GALAX formerly know as Galaxy, the maker of the infamous high end NVIDIA H.O.F. cards among other things. The other SKU that Galax has in their storage portfolio is the H.O.F SSD’s, but that a different story for different day. Lets see what this inexpensive SSD performs today, shall we?

ATTO Disk Benchmark
The great thing about ATTO is that one can test with predefined block sizes. So, we can test with a 32MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32MB in 1MB files, providing an opportunity to test with various file sizes. This benchmark is a preferred among manufacturers as ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we used a set length of 256mb and tested both the Read and Write performances for various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb with a queue depth of 4 and 8

ATTO QD4
ATTO QD8

With speeds peaking beyond the 500MB/s mark, the procedure’s started off on a good note for the GALAX GAMER L. Lets see if the trend continues.

Anvil’s Storage utilities Benchmark
Anvil Pro or Anvil’s Storage Utilities[Depending on what you’d want to call it] is an ‘all inclusive’ storage utility that allows testing transfer speeds as well as IOPS and lets the user tweak and adjust to find just the right mix in their testing medium, the IOPS tests being fully configurable with preset testing scenarios for read, write and mixed IO. The Benchmarks menu includes an SSD test, Endurance Testing, and 3 pre-configured IOPS tests.

Anvil Pro

HD Tune
HD Tune Pro is a hard disk utility and benchmarking utility for Windows. This tiny application allows you to scan your hard drives for errors or take a deeper look at several performance figures coming from the storage unit. We used the included Benchmark utility tool to our hearts’ content, because why not?

HD Tune File Benchmark
HD Tune Read Benchmark

CRYSTAL DISK Benchmark
Crystal Disk Benchmark is used to measure Read and Write performances through sampling of highly compressible data (oFill/1Fill), or random data. Crystal Disk Mark scores usually drop a bit compared to ATTO, and this is the result of the test data now being primarily incompressible – Mostly movies, music and photographs. We tested the drive with multiple data sizes ranging from 500MB to 1000MB.

Crystal Diskmark 500MB
Crystal Diskmark 500MB

AS SSD benchmark Suite
This nice little German application gives an extensive result set. The test is popular, so I included it. AS SSD, for the most part, gives us the worst case scenario in SSD transfer speeds because of its use of incompressible data.

AS-SSD Benchmark
AS-SSD File Copy Benchmark
AS-SSD File Compression Benchmark

And that Concludes the Benchmarks

Conclusion

The GALAX Gamer L SSD brings to the table one more contender in the SSD market with the Phison controller and does the job petty well. The only other viable competitor in this niche is the Kingston A400 and the Gamer L performs toe to toe with it while being very competitive in price. With all-round good performance across the benchmark suites, Galax proved to us that they are no slouch. This SSD is here to stay and compete in the DIY market for a long time.

A Silver from Team TechARX for the GALAX Gamer L SSD 120GB!