Intel X-25M 80GB SSD Review

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.


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.