Why You Can Trust CNET Strontium Hawk 120GB review: Strontium Hawk 120GB
Strontium's SF2281-based SSD brings faster writes than your standard SandForce SSD.
SandForce may be a fading name in the consumer world after the LSI acquisition in October last year, and the long wait between the second- and third-generation architecture is certainly allowing others to catch up on what was once an impressive lead.
Strontium Hawk 120GB
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
SandForce's second-generation controller still has a role to play, though, if anything in helping to drive down the prices of SSDs into something resembling affordable.
On the test bench today is Strontium's Hawk 120GB (which gives us 112GB of usable space). The Singaporean brand's SF2281 controlled SSD is the first all-white SSD we've seen, and, at the time of writing, the 120GB model can be had for around AU$110, while the 240GB model can be had for about AU$200. It's 7mm high, making it suitable for all but the thinnest of laptops. It's an MLC drive, using Hynix H27QDG8VEBIR NAND.
Both CrystalDiskMark and Anvil's Storage Utilities were set to 1GB datasets, using incompressible data.
Choose a benchmark: CrystalDisk read | CrystalDisk write | AS SSD read | AS SSD write | Anvil read | Anvil write
We're admittedly being a bit tough on the SandForce controller, as it performs its best with compressible data. Yet despite this, Strontium's Hawk holds its own reasonably well. While as a general rule higher capacities tend to be faster, Strontium's 120GB manages to hold out against SanDisk's 240GB in writes, even though they use the same controller. No doubt if we had a 240GB Hawk in the labs, it would be an interesting beast.
Strontium's biggest threat, though, is OCZ's Agility 4; while the Hawk for the most part takes the sequential cake, the Agility eats it for breakfast when you start throwing multiple requests at it. You also have to take into account that you squeeze out another 7GB of usable data from the Agility, and that it can generally be found for cheaper. In terms of bang for buck, it's a hard drive to beat.
Still, these days it's all about pricing — and if you can find the Hawk for a good price, then it's certainly nothing to turn your nose up at.