Intel X-25M 80GB SSD Review

Read Bandwidth

For this benchmark, HDTach was used. It shows the potential read speed which you are likely to experience with these drives. The long test was run to give a slightly more accurate picture.

We don’t put much stock in Burst speed readings and this goes double for SSD based drives. The main reason we include it is to show what under perfect conditions a given drive is capable of even though the more important result is that of the Average Speed. This number will tell you what to expect from a given drive in normal, day to day operations. The higher the average, the faster your entire system will seem.


I honestly didn’t believe these numbers were correct the first time I ran HDTach; however by the third try I was becoming a believer and when the 4th came up the same….well how else can you describe read speeds which are litteraly more than DOUBLE that of a VelociRaptor or WD 640GB? Term like "insane" and some others we can’t print come to mind, but I think eventhe guy upstairs won’t mind me taking his name in vein when s/he sees these numbers!

Write Performance

For this benchmark HD Tune Pro was used. To run the write benchmark on a drive, you must first remove all partitions from that drive and then and only then will it allow you to run this test. Unlike some other benchmarking utilities, HD Tune Pro writes across the full area of the drive, thus it easily shows any weakness a drive may have.

While most OS drives spend most of their times reading and not writing, the write speed of the drive does have a big impact on the stutter issue and how fast the drive feels.


The X-25M is "only" capable of an average of 72 MB/s writes but what is more important was its minimum was a rock solid 64.5 MB/s. This is very, very good and it is highly unlikely that this drive will suffer and stuttering due to slow writes. It may suffer from them IF the controller and cache buffer get overwhelmed BUT it won’t be because those 20 MLC NAND chips weren’t performing up to spec.