Nice choices, even if it would have been interesting to see how a basic RAID0 of the VR's or 640's did. Y'know, just to see if they got their asses kicked a little less. :biggrin: But a good selection of competitors, and a job well done on the review. I've seriously been looking at these drives, with the obvious price caveat.
One thign I noticed omitted was the drive's warranty details, which is kind of a significant point in my books. Aside from the length of time, I believe Intel addressed the issue of nand-cell degradation by guaranteeing that you could write 100GB/day for 5 years straight, before the drives would cough. Given how few other manufacturers have been willing to give those kind of concrete numbers, it's a nice little perk to help justify the price tag.
There's been a fair bit of speculation/concern/claims regarding the fragmentation of SSD drives, apparently relating to how the controller handles and groups small packets of data, which can apparently lead to a gradual degradation of performance over time, and requires a full format to fix. Still seems to be a lot of debate over it, though. Did anything come to light while you had your hands on the X-25M?