Intel X-25M 80GB SSD Review

Interior Impressions

As they say beauty is only skin deep….but ugly goes to the bone. It's time to see if this wee drive is as beautiful on the inside as it is on the outside so let’s pry the top off.


Doing this is simplicity itself as the top of the casing is held in place with only four ultra small screws. Be warned: removing these screws does nullify your warranty. This may not matter to us as our sample has no warranty to void, but your brand new X-25M does have a 2 year warranty and it would be a shame to void it just to satisfy your curiosity.


While the PCB may seem upside down when compared to our previous SSD review’s layout, as the X-25s controller and cache are located on the back side; but once you get past this you quickly realize that Intel didn’t try to totally reinvent the wheel. At one end, you have your SATA power and data connectors, with the SSD controller chip in front and then 2 rows of 5 Intel NAND MLC flash chips. The top side or "other side" of this PCB holds another 2 rows of 5 chips soldered to that side of the board; making it for a grand total of 1 controller chip, 1 RAM chip and 20 NAND flash chips.


The controller of the X-25M is an Intel System On a Chip pc29AS21AA0 controller. This is the heart and soul of this unit and is the secret to its success. In a nut shell this SOC features advanced architecture which allows it to control 10 parallel NAND flash channels and (with NCQ) can handle up to 32 concurrent operations. The scary thing about this drive is the "M" stands for mainstream and as such is not considered by Intel to be an extreme performance drive.

The easiest way to think about how this controller and NAND flash is set up is to not think about RAID 0 drives (after all, SSDs do not need to write and read in a linear fashion for maximum performance); rather think about how your computer’s memory controller runs. In modern systems you can have dual or triple channel memory all controlled by one controller which can read and write to any of the channels at the same time. Now take that triple channel setup and make it a TEN channel setup, swap out the i7 memory controller for the X-25M's SOC controller, and swap out the DDR3 RAM for MLC NAND Flash RAM. THIS is what Intel has done and to be honest with you, it really is a work of art. The very fact they managed to cram this all into 2.5" laptop form factor just increases the wow factor.


This 50nm, 8GB (32Gbit) MLC NAND flash model number 29F32G08CAMC1 is also made by Intel. Not much is known about this memory as Intel is very tight lipped about their specifications but they do state it meets the Open NAND Flash Interface 1.0 specifications. This is not that surprising as Intel is a member of the ONFI consortium which are working to develop open standards for NAND flash chips. In any case there are a grand total of 20 on the PCB all of which are grouped into pairs unto the 10 parallel data lanes.


As you can see in the picture above, the Intel X-25m has onboard cache. However, unlike most drives the cache is solely used for caching commands sent to and from your motherboard's onboard ATA controller. In a nut shell this RAM chip allows the X-25M to keep your system stutter free even when it is overloaded by keeping the ATA controller happy. Most likely instead of extended pauses (i.e. your sytem becoming unresponsive) it will just get slower and slower as the demands increase....just like a regular high performance spindle based drive. The chip shown above is a Samsung K4S281632I-UC60. In this particular instance, this chip was made in the 16 week of 2008. Using the online Samsung model decoder this chip is a 16MB (128Mbit), 4 bank 3.3volt, lead free 6ns (166mhs @ CL 3) DRAM chip.

All in all, the X-25M looks a lot like many Samsung based drives on the market today; albeit with a few Intel tweaks added it. Of course (with the exception of the cache chip) this doesn’t have any Samsung chips to be seen anywhere and is a Intel in house design. This not necessarily a bad thing, as Samsung based drives are having stutter issues left, right and center and we highly doubt Intel would allow that to happen in their first foray into SSDs…though, to be honest it wouldn’t be the first time a big company messed up entering a different market niche. Well, that’s enough talking and analysing this drive...let’s find out whether or not the X-25M can walk the walk like it can talk the talk!