Intel X25-M Solid State Drive (SSD) Review
Intel, hands down, makes the best solid-state disk drives you can buy. They offer two products, X25-M and X18-M, which offer up to 80Gb of SATA storage in a 2.5″ form factor–perfect as a notebook drop-in replacement. The drives support Native Command Queuing, and are rated to perform 3.3K writes per second, and 35K reads per second. They use very little power, and generate almost no heat.
Intel X25-M 80GB MLC Solid State Drive (SSD)
This is the result of benchmarking the Intel X-25M SSD with HD Tach. Notice that the sequential read speed is 220 MB/s, and that random reads take just 0.1ms.
This is the result of benchmarking the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s, an older 7200 rpm drive. It only attains 65MB/s sustained read, and 13.4ms random reads. The Intel SSD can read small bits of data over 100x faster than a spinning hard drive, and sustain a constant read rate over 3x the seagate. It’s those small reads & writes are what typically slow down home computers, as they need to constantly write small file for the operating system, file system, virtual memory, etc. With a hard disk, those writes impact the reading of other files, as the disk heads have to seek back and forth across the surface of the disk. With an SSD, there is no physical movement, and reads and writes don’t interfere in the same way.
If you’re interested in reading more, The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ not just compares all the SSDs on the market, but also goes into some detail about the underlying technology powering SSDs. They conclude that Intel’s SSDs, which offer incredibly low-latency random writes, offer the best value.
You can buy the Intel SSDSA2MH080G1C5 X25-M 80GB MLC 2.5-Inch 9.5mm Solid State Drive on Amazon for just $343!
Update: If you don’t understand how much better the Intel X25-M is than the competition, carefully looking at this just off the press benchmark against the new Corsair model should tell you. Why do you buy SSD? For fast random writes. Something the other SSD manufactors just do not get.
| This entry was posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 at 1:31 pm and is tagged with intel ssd, hd tach, solid state drive, seagate barracuda, solid state disk drives, solid state disk, ssds, amazon, x25, virtual memory, ssd, x18, underlying technology, home computers, barracuda, 25m, ocz, corsair, anthology, hard disk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
No one wants to say that the Intel-SSD is bad, but what youre doing here is simply wrong.
You compare the High-End-SSD itself against a very old HDD.
And don’t be too offended but… You compare 13.4 ms random access time against 0,1 ms and your result is that the SSD WRITES more than 100 times faster than the HDD.
This is so completely wrong! It actually shows a lack of fundamental knowledge that makes your whole advertising post that you denote “review” a laugh. Sorry to say that. Its sad but its true.
Additionally hd-tach is a very bad tool to compare different techniques because it outputs absolutely no information about write speeds and write/read speed in differing sectors.
I knocked up the terminology, yes, only measuring random reads here, not writes. But the same principle applies. I think the comparison of SSD to old hard disk is fundamentally sound, since that’s what most people will be upgrading from.
There’s a new firmware that improves defrag performance too, btw: http://support.intel.com/support/ssdc/index_update.htm