Intel X-25M 80GB SSD Review Comment Thread

[AkG]

Well it certainly has been awhile since we looked at SSDs...BUT we think you will agree it was worth the wait! For our first foray back into the field of SSDs we looked at the monster X-25M from Intel. I think its fair to say that the hype surrounding it is well founded!

To get a good overview of this X-25M please read our review here: X-25M


Hope you enjoy it,
AkG

[lowfat]

My X25-M was suppose to be here monday, but alas is not arriving till tomorrow. I would of liked a few more real world tests (like game/application loading). but otherwise it was a good review.

[MpG]

Nice choices, even if it would have been interesting to see how a basic RAID0 of the VR's or 640's did. Y'know, just to see if they got their asses kicked a little less. But a good selection of competitors, and a job well done on the review. I've seriously been looking at these drives, with the obvious price caveat.

One thign I noticed omitted was the drive's warranty details, which is kind of a significant point in my books. Aside from the length of time, I believe Intel addressed the issue of nand-cell degradation by guaranteeing that you could write 100GB/day for 5 years straight, before the drives would cough. Given how few other manufacturers have been willing to give those kind of concrete numbers, it's a nice little perk to help justify the price tag.

There's been a fair bit of speculation/concern/claims regarding the fragmentation of SSD drives, apparently relating to how the controller handles and groups small packets of data, which can apparently lead to a gradual degradation of performance over time, and requires a full format to fix. Still seems to be a lot of debate over it, though. Did anything come to light while you had your hands on the X-25M?

[lowfat]

On the first page it stats warranty is 3 years

[MpG]

Yeah, I caught that part, but

Originally Posted by Anandtech

...Intel went one step further and delivered 5x what the OEMs requested. Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact. The drives only ship with a 3 year warranty but I suspect that there'd be some recourse if you could prove that Intel's 100GB/day promise was false.

While it's kind of died down now, (in favour of other issues) there was a lot of concern over how long SSD's would last under database and pagefile duties. And I have yet to see anyone (aside from Intel) offer any sort of concrete numbers to reassure people on this issue.

[belgolas]

Nice review, good job. I am gonna wait till SSD is down in price to under 200 and more storage with more performance. I know I want everything.

[Cptn Vortex]

Good review! However about the comment of "80gb is more than enough for even the most bloated of OS's" (or along those lines...) : I have a 150GB partition set up for my machine here, and I am still having to uninstall and delete games that I dont use often to install anything new. My OS and the size of new games just CHEWS space.... I am going to go no less than 250GB from now on for OS installs!! Games these days are 10+ GB each, with some reaching 20+!

[belgolas]

Originally Posted by Cptn Vortex

Good review! However about the comment of "80gb is more than enough for even the most bloated of OS's" (or along those lines...) : I have a 150GB partition set up for my machine here, and I am still having to uninstall and delete games that I dont use often to install anything new. My OS and the size of new games just CHEWS space.... I am going to go no less than 250GB from now on for OS installs!! Games these days are 10+ GB each, with some reaching 20+!

Thats why you have a second hard drive. As an OS hard drive you keep just the OS and a few small programs on there. Nothing else.

[AkG]

MPG...there is no concrete numbers. They don't exist and prolly won't for a couple more years. Sorry. But its doubtful they will die early under normal wear and tear. Biggest thing is to never fill them to more than 50% capacity. That gives the wear leveling algorithms enough space to work with.

[SKYMTL]

Originally Posted by MpG

One thign I noticed omitted was the drive's warranty details, which is kind of a significant point in my books. Aside from the length of time, I believe Intel addressed the issue of nand-cell degradation by guaranteeing that you could write 100GB/day for 5 years straight, before the drives would cough. Given how few other manufacturers have been willing to give those kind of concrete numbers, it's a nice little perk to help justify the price tag.

Actually, what you are talking about is more along the lines of MTBF. In all reality the 100GB/day is a moot issue since there is no way you would accurately be able to log how much you use the drive and then prove it to Intel for warranty purposes.