Intel X-25M 80GB SSD Review

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!


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.