In our first solid-state drive round-up last year we quickly learned that a SSD can only be as good as the controller working the magic behind it. That was the last time we checked a solid state drive from G.Skill, who is better known for its overclocking friendly memory modules.As you may recall G.Skill's early entry in the SSD arena, the 128GB Titan was plagued with stuttering problems attributed to the small buffer size used by its dreaded JMicron 602B controller. This controller was an improvement upon the 16KB on the original 602A, but still paled in comparison to the 256KB cache offered by the Intel X25-M and the 64MB off-chip DRAM supported by the Indilinx Barefoot controller.It became widely known then that the lack of a proper cache would cause poor write performance, particularly when dealing with small files as evidenced in random 4KB write tests. Struggling to sell any products using JMicron's chip, manufacturers quickly moved to newer controllers from Samsung and Indilinx, including G.Skill, who eventually dropped their Titan line in favor of the the Indilinx Barefoot-based Falcon series.Intel subsequently released their second generation X25-M SSDs using newer 34nm MLC NAND flash memory to increase data density and help make the product affordable. And eventually, more affordable it became. Whereas their original 80GB X25-M SSD was introduced at around $595, the 'G2' version offering the same base capacity is currently priced anywhere from $250 to $290.