First Impressions - Intel X25-M Solid State Drive

proud2deviate

proud2deviate

Joined
Apr 5, 2004
Messages
2,712
I picked up this little gem yesterday, and I'm totally stoked about it. It's frigging FAST! I did a fresh install of Windows XP, and it took roughly 13 minutes. Applications start and install faster, start-up is faster, and everything in general is faster. This thing is so fast, that the shockwave it creates blows women's clothes off:cool:

It's quiet, too. No humming, clicking, whirring hard drive. Power consumption should be less, but I haven't done any battery tests yet.

It was pricey, but worth it. I paid about $400 for the 160gb variant. The performance increase is so astounding, I can barely feel the wallet burn. Seriously, I won't ever own another computer without some sort of SSD in it.

I'll post back if any negatives arise. From a first impression standpoint, however, this thing totally friggin' rocks:D
 
I've been using an X25-M G2 for a while now. I agree, it really is one of the most substantial upgrades you can make to your computer. I doubt you're going to find many, if any negatives, other than storage capacity.
 
In the future I'm sure capacity will go up, and prices will go down, just like what we're experiencing with normal hard drives. I got my current HD for $65, and it's 1,5 terabyte. Granted, it's not very fast but big enough for years to come.
Once prices go down I'd like a SSD, they seem superior (but I've read that they lose performance over time, and are more prone to corrupt once that happens). I don't know about that.
Let us know if anything bad happens :D
 
One of the litttle-mentioned but highly-valuable features of these flash-based solid-state drives is that they "fail soft". Electromagnetic/mechanical drives very often fail suddenly and catastrophically resulting in the total loss of data. These flash-based drives fail slowly; one sector fails and then another here and there. When a sector fails, the previous data can usually be read, but new data can't be written, so the drive's internal controller will write new data into a different sector and stop using the bad one... no loss of data. Eventually, the drive itself will actually allert you (through Windows, of course) that is failing and should be replaced soon. You can do that at your leisure with no loss of data. Nice.
 
The only 2 drawbacks I can see with SSDs are the price and size. For the speed increase and size decrease I don't think they compare with my WD Blacks, with the 1-2 second improvement in speed I think I can live with my harddrives and the extra money in my pocket. My blacks with 64Mb cache go for $0.11/Gb, the SSD is going at $2.50/Gb, right now the price difference is too much, but if prices come down the SSDs would make great boot drives
 
unky_gumbi said:
The only 2 drawbacks I can see with SSDs are the price and size. For the speed increase and size decrease I don't think they compare with my WD Blacks, with the 1-2 second improvement in speed I think I can live with my harddrives and the extra money in my pocket. My blacks with 64Mb cache go for $0.11/Gb, the SSD is going at $2.50/Gb, right now the price difference is too much, but if prices come down the SSDs would make great boot drives
Click to expand...

A big part of it is a near-zero seek time. All data is equally accessible. With a conventional HDD, you might have to wait for the head to sweep from the inner track to the outer and back again several times, depending on fragmentation. Even if your drive is properly defragged (I like Ultimate Defrag for this,) there still might be that one needed .dll on the inner tracks.


The platter speed for WD Black is 7200 rpm, correct? I wish we could do some controlled, side-by-side tests:(
 
The new drives are pretty cool. I remember when HD memory was $100/megabyte and about the biggest you could get was a 40meg
 
I also have one in my laptop and one in the desktop.
You should install Windows 7 to support TRIM, otherwise the SSD would get really slow after using it for some time.
In Windows XP you can also schedule a cleanup from the SSD toolbox, I should run it once a week for sure.

Also don't defragment a SSD, it's useless and creates extra wear for the drive.
 
Bierkameel said:
I also have one in my laptop and one in the desktop.
You should install Windows 7 to support TRIM, otherwise the SSD would get really slow after using it for some time.
In Windows XP you can also schedule a cleanup from the SSD toolbox, I should run it once a week for sure.

Also don't defragment a SSD, it's useless and creates extra wear for the drive.
Click to expand...

Way ahead of you. Windows 7 is my primary OS. I just keep XP around for the odd program that gags 7. TRIM support was a big factor in my decision to purchase. I didn't want a "great today, ho-hum tomorrow" situation.

Thanks for the defrag tip; that was going to be my next question. I might analyze the drive, just to see what Ultimate Defrag thinks of it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top