discussion Intel X-25M 80GB SSD Review

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XP Start Up / Adobe Load Time

XP Start Up

When it comes to hard drive performance there is one area that even the most oblivious user notices: how long it takes to load the Operating System. For our tests the clock starts as soon as the system "beeps!" and stops when our Anti-Virus splash screen disappears. While all the other tests were run with a streamlined XP image this particular image is the test bed's "day to day" OS and it has accumulated a lot of crud over the months from installs and removals. We chose the Anti-Virus splash screen as our finish line as it is the last program to be loaded on start up.

In real world numbers this drive is simply better than the rest, but the differences are a lot closer than one would imagine and really highlights the problems with synthetic-only tests. You can use synthetics to give you a general idea of how good or bad a drive will probably do in the real world but it will only be a guess at best.

ADOBE CS3 LOAD TIME

Photoshop is a notoriously slow loading program under the best of circumstances, but when you add in a bunch of extra brushes and the such you get a really great torture test which can bring even the best of the best to their knees. Let’s see how our review unit faired in the Adobe crucible!

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The X-25M does post some darn reasonable numbers when it comes to Adobe, but they are not good enough to land it in first place. It's funny but this is one of the few tests we have done so far where the X-25M did not excel. Don’t get us wrong, the numbers are very respectable but they don’t exactly crush the competition either.

 

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Real World Data Transfers / Extended Runtime

Real World Data Transfers

No matter how good a synthetic benchmark like IOMeter or PCMark is, it cannot really tell you how your hard drive will perform in "real world" situations. All of us here at Hardware Canucks strive to give you the best, most complete picture of a review item’s true capabilities and to this end we will be running timed data transfers to give you a general idea of how its performance relates to real life use. To help replicate worse case scenarios we will transfer a 4.00GB contiguous RAR file and a folder containg 49 subfolders with a total 2108 files varying in length from 20mb to 1kb (1.00 GB total).

Testing will include transfer to and transferring from the devices, timing each process individually to provide an approximate Read and Write performance. To then stress the drive even more we will then make a copy of the large file to another portion of the same drive and then repeat the process with the small one. This will test the drive to its limits as it will be reading and writing simultaneously. Here is what we found.

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Large/small, to itself, from it or even to it the X-25M simply dominates most of them, and its only when its less than phenomenal write speeds come into play that it posts anything but amazing results. On the bright side, with small file writes (an area where most drives' performance tanks) this bad boys comes into its own.

Unfortunately, the converse is also true and its lower sequential writes does handicap it to a certain extent as the controller is unable to keep up the pace. However, this selfsame controller has no problems handling reads of various sizes, nor reading and writing to itself awfully quick.

What all this says to us is the controller and MLC combination has been tweaked extensively to move and write small files as fast possible...even if it comes at the expense of lowered large file transfer speeds. To us this is a fair trade off as the X-25Ms are meant for OS drives and not "storage" drives so this trade off in large file write perfectly is perfectly acceptable to us.

Extended Runtime Testing

Where these units are marketed towards the home environment, it is reasonable to expect them to be able to handle moderate usage, with random reads and writes of various sizes. To test how robust this unit is, and how well it can take handle a marathon stress test, the X-25M was subjected to a 20hr torture session. During this time IOMeter was setup to run for 20 hours using various size tests all with completely random read/write scenarios.

This drive did get slightly warm during these tests and at its worst was clocking in at about 8 degrees above ambient. This is still really good as this is a tough test, and really helps highlight that while it may under worse case scenario uses a full amp of power it doesn’t waste much of that juice on heat.

 

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Conclusion

Conclusion

We certainly had high expectations for this drive as we were hoping to use it and its numbers as our Gold Standard for future reviews and boy did the Intel X-25M ever deliver. It simply crushes the competition in many of the tests to the point where it almost became boring to test the darn thing as we knew what the outcome was going to be.

This drive really only has three weaknesses; and one of those -its mediocre write speeds- is not a deal-breaking weakness at all. Honestly, this drive was a joy to use as an OS drive and we would certainly consider using it as a test bed OS drive, which is one of the biggest compliments we can bestow on any drive. As for the second weakness, that would have to be its capacity but once again, this is not going to be a big deal for the majority of you. Sure, we all have become jaded with monster super-sized drives, but 80GB is big enough for even the most bloated of OS’es. Heck, it wasn’t that many years ago (OK it may be more than just few…but still…) that 80GB was considered large enough, or even HUGE. We have eked by with only 32GB SSDs in netbooks and if 32 were enough for a portable computer then 80GB is more than enough for all but a few users out there. For you guys ‘n gals how need the best and 80GB still isn't enough for you…splurge and get the 160GB version.

Honestly, the only real weakness this unit has in today's market is its high price tag. Any way you slice it, the X-25M is not cheap. This is not unexpected as judging from the performance numbers this thing posts, the R&D that went into it must have cost a small fortune. As such, we all have to accept that any new technology is going to cost early adopters an arm and a leg. If you absolutely, positively have to have the fastest drive out there, the X-25M is definitely the one to get for the time being. In all honesty, if all that is stopping you from pulling the trigger on this bad boy is price, we would seriously consider you go back and check the benchmarks again.

However, you also have to remember that the synthetic tests we ran don't even tell half the story. If you check out the real world performance, it becomes obvious that a even a blazingly fast SSD will have a minimal impact on overall system performance. Sure, you may find opening applications to be a bit more snappy but in the end, you have to ask yourself: does the end justify the means? We believe so.

For this and all the little things which we have gone over in this review we here at HWC are Damn Proud to present the X-25M with our most prestigious award the Dam Good Hardware award. Congratulations, Intel for knocking your first try at mainstream SSDs not only out of the park but into the darn parking lot! We expect this drive to be our high water mark for our SSD reviews for foreseeable future.


Pros:

- Good write performance
- Amazing read performance
- Light Weight
- Silent
- Vibration Resistant
- 3 year Warranty

Cons:

- Price
- 80GB is a little on the small side

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