It would be untrue to say that Intel’s X25-M SSD was a surprise when released, but we can say that it was unexpected. We had previously heard of solid state drives from the likes of OCZ, Samsung and other memory vendors, but we were not expecting Intel to release a drive, especially not the fastest drive out of all of them.
The Intel X25-M SSD is small by today’s standards, with only 80GB (74GB formatted) of storage and may not be suitable for a number of people who tend to install many applications and games which would easily use up the entire 80GB. However, the X25 isn’t geared for mass storage, but performance where one would install the operating system, set a swop file, or where everyday performance-sensitive applications would be stored.
One would not keep videos, music or any other media on this drive as that would be wasteful, since such media is not as sensitive to drive performance as actual applications. The Intel X25-M SSD, as with all NANDbased storage, offers several advantages over traditional electromagnetic storage devices.
Solid state drives are noise free, cooler, significantly faster, more robust, easier to manufacture, and take up less space than normal drives. With that said, solid state drives are horrifically expensive, capacities are limited but, most importantly, the average life-span of any SSD is lower than that of a traditional drive.
You may be wondering what is so different about the Intel drive that makes it stand head and shoulders above the rest, and why it commands such a price tag. Well, it’s not a simple answer, but basically Intel has managed to make MLC (Multi Level Flash) NAND memory as fast as traditional SLC (Single Level Flash) NAND memory.
Intel has done this by reducing the write amplification factor significantly, which is typically anything from 20x to 40x, to 1.1x. Write amplification is similar to how a traditional drive writes any piece of information on to the platter. Depending on file system and allocation size, writing a 10kb file to the hard drive takes up typically two 8KB or three 4KB blocks. So that same 10KB file ends up taking up anything between 12KB and 16KB of actual drive space.
On SSDs this has a negative effect on performance as, when writing to any block, the system needs to first read 128KB, then write 128k back again with the modified 10KB of data. This causes the massive write overhead associated with SSDs.
Intel has not only remedied this but has managed to increase drive lifespan as a result, which should re-assure those worried about losing sensitive data prematurely due to failing NAND cells.
After all the technology however, what most people will want to know is how the drive performs. In this regard, there is not a single drive you can buy today that will be faster than the Intel X25-M SSD. To give you some reference, the discontinued GIGABYTE I-RAM, which made use of DDR 400MHz modules to make a drive out of RAM, is not only slower than the Intel SSD, it’s about half the speed.
The Intel drive is so fast that it manages to put a significant distance performance-wise between itself and the WD VELOCIRAPTOR, which is without a doubt, the fastest magnetic drive available on the market.
With the X25, not only did all the benchmarks load almost instantly, games that usually have a long loading period
such as CRYSIS are ready to play almost immediately. However, more than the load times, it is in the drive reading and writing during gameplay that is impressive. While disk thrashing is never a good thing, when it does have to happen, you would rather have it on the X25-M than on any other drive.
The Intel X25-M SSD is simply the fastest drive we have ever tested by a significant margin.
Specs
Capacity: 80GB (74GB formatted)
Interface: SATA 3Gb/sec
Sache: None
RRP: R7000
Supplier: Intel
Score 5/5
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