Customer Reviews

Intel X25-E Extreme 32GB SATA 2.5-Inch SLC Solid State Drive

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ubuntu boots up so fast i'm going to cry.

Cons.
Btrfs isn't out yet.

The biggest complaint people seem to have had about this drive is the price and capacity. Truth be told, the price is absolutely worth it. How many other components in your system can you migrate to your next system? This is one of those components. You probably invested hundreds of dollars into your RAM and CPU hoping your computer would be faster, perhaps you even setup RAID, but the fact is, whatever you did to upgrade your computer, it's potential is going to waste unless it's sporting one of these drives.

I'll share a rundown of my workstation configuration:

First, I have two of these X25-E drives with RAID in my workstation. Not because I needed the extra speed (one drive is speedy enough) but because I need redundancy. Never know when something will fail, even one of these disks, so that is my personal solution. Windows 7 boots up to the Desktop in 14 seconds from power-on, and most of those 14 seconds is waiting for the BIOS to initiate the other system components.

Second, the 32GB storage is plenty for the operating system (Windows 7), all of my applications including Office and Photoshop, and I still have about 11 GB to spare. For graphics, music, videos, etc., I do not use this drive as storage. I have much cheaper and much larger secondary internal mass storage and external USB mass storage for that. Why waste the high performance SSD on static data, right?

Third, prior to owning this X25-E, I already had an iRAM disk (by GigaByte). Now, it isn't nearly as spacious, but it did it's job. I've re-attached it as tertiary storage and moved my Windows paging file, TEMP folders, and Photoshop scratch files here. The system already performed well without doing this, but now I feel I'm getting even more money's worth from both the iRAM and the SSD in terms of longevity and wear. (I am considering HyperOS's HyperDrive 5M for editing larger Photoshop and 3D rendering scratch space, but I digress.)

Fourth, not only does this SSD use less power and is quiet, but it also caused my workstation fans to slow down from the reduction of internal temperature. There's even less noise and heat emanating from the box now, plus the cooler flowing air is healthier for the video card and iRAM drive, is it not?

Last, but not least, I've tested MTRON Pro (search "Battleship MTRON" for testing on these disks by NLH) and RunCore drives which claim similar capability as this X25-E. Their claims are not so accurate. In fact, the MTRON disks died within 6 months (3 out of 4!!) and the RunCore tended to lock up the GUI during huge write operations. I'd recommened the RunCore only for *netbook* upgrades because of form-factor, but I'll be upgrading my *laptop* with an X25-E for sure, especially now that they're available in 64GB capacities.

I guarantee if you use this disk, you WILL NOT BE UNHAPPY. As with any storage, though, it can fail and backups are your ONLY recourse for unique data -- so do it. This is merely best practice as there isn't, and has never been, a magical data unicorn to save us from hardware failure.

I've been using one of these for about 6 months now and I must say it's amazing. The snappiness of applications on starting up is fantastic. It is a bit of a pain to have to offload a lot of things to slower storage, but it's made development on this system a breeze!

I'd give it 4.5 stars just because of the price, but otherwise it's been good to me.

75% of My Last 4 Sellers to Me Sold Severely Used - Not NEW X25-E SLC SSD. 3 Sellers in a row fraudulently and intentionally falsified the SSD condition, as "NEW" So buyers beware; if you do buy "NEW", upon receipt double check by Google search terms "Intel ssd toolkit download" and download V2 of Intel's toolkit. Run the Toolkit to get the S.M.A.R.T. internal firmware counters, and look at Power-On Hours, Power Cycles Off to On Times ), and Host Writes if NEW ssd should be close to Zero ). You will need a desktop or laptop with a real SATA connection to the X25-E, where eSATA laptop port will not work. For me, I used a SATA HDD Caddy to place my Intel X25-E SSD in the available DVD SATA slot, by swapping out my DVD drive with the HDD Caddy. I then ran Intel's Toolkit to dump the Intel SSD S.M.A.R.T. counters. Alternatively, Intel has shipped to at least 30 on-line storesTOTALLY NEW INTEL SERIES 710 eMLC 100 GB SSD with MTBF of 2 M Hrs. for roughly $650 ea. Intel claims as good or better than X25-E SLC. Just Google Search Terms "Intel Series 710 100GB" to avoid "USED" and get TRUE INTEL "NEW". - Jeff in IT Chicago.

It's very fast. It is very nearly totally silent. I have only noticed it to make noise once (which makes little sense) when it turned hibernate back on..
It's very small amount of space.
If you are going to load Vista on this drive you will likely have to give up hibernate feature. I have 6GB of RAM after upgrading and 6GB of 32GB drive is too dear a price to pay for hibernating.
When all was done after the Vista home premium OS reload I still have almost 6GB free on the drive.
All docs and applications are moved to a normal hard drive plus some other tweaks using Link Shell Extensions to relocate the driver cache.
[...]

If you are lazy go with 64GB.

We got two of these to replace our Iram ram drives which we have been using for 3 years as our network drive. Essentially we got these to use as ram in a box. I had just two things to note here that I think are important.

First, after 4 months, one of these drives failed. Unlike a hard drive, there isnt anyone to go to that I know of to recover the data. It just failed right in the middle of the day under normal conditions. So although these drives are supposed to be sturdy and long lasting, they are not perfect. The good news is the folks at Intel were fantastic about replacing the drive and the lady there said they replace about one drive a day.

Second, I believe it is important to format these correctly, especially if you are going to use it as a boot drive. My understanding of this is you want to format these as NTFS with allocation unit size of 4096. It is well worth the time to research and understand this issue because we set up our first drive with the "default" allocation size and it stuttered during most boot-ups. After we reformatted, the problem went away.

Finally, as one of the other reviewers noted, I didn't find a whole lot of information about the difference between single cell drives and multi cell drives in the sales literature. But there are plenty of blogs about this and after reading for a while, it looks like a single cell drive should last about 10 times longer than a multi cell drive, so we opted for the single cell drives. According to my calculations, our single cell ssd's should work just fine for about 60 years in our environment.

The X25-E is, simply put, awesome. Over the next few years ALL and I do mean all hard drives will move toward this technology. For those of you on the fence debating the X25-E there are a few points to consider.
1) Storage needs: This is a 32 GB drive (formats to about 30 GB). After the OS and your main apps there is not a lot of room left for data, unless we are talking text docs, spreadsheets, etc. (Note: on a high speed 32 GB USB flash drive Warcraft plays very well).
2) Price point: These drives, although awesome as they are, have a heavy price. Typical early market adoption scenario.
So, those were the `negative' points <cracking knuckles> now allow me. . . .
1) This drive is so fast. This is not a hard drive as we used to know it. This is RAM stuffed into a hard drive; sort of. Non volatile (without power it keeps your data, like a typical hard drive). Search youtube for mem89756 and watch the video on this drive to see it in action.
2) In the Windows world use Vista or, preferably, Windows 7 with this drive as there have been many optimizations around this type of drive relative to those two operating systems. I won't digress here, just to say that we now must think of drive space efficiency with respect to longevity coupled with the capacity to spread the data out throughout the memory space.
3) Power consumption has been reduced substantially. There are no moving parts. This is analogous to moving from portable CD players to flash memory MP3 players. However, being that a hard drive is only a function of the total power consumed in a computer; this will hold a value in relation to the hard drive consumption. So, this new hard drive, in a laptop, may now use 40% less power. However, in relation to overall system power demand we may see a 5 to 10 percent increase in battery life. In the smaller netbook laptops we would see the most increase in battery life per charge as the rest of the system has, in ratio, a better power consumption proportion.
4) This is an SLC drive, not MLC. This means better read/write speed from the memory array. Wikipedia these two terms to understand why these (SLC, MLC) are different relating to performance and storage capacity.
5) G-shock rating. Although for what I paid for the drive I am not wanting to voluntarily test this. The drive has no moving parts and can therefore take as much abuse as the welding points can handle. Easy to say, this is exponentially higher than the "record player" style hard drives prevalent of today's mass storage drives.
6) I am sure others will have a few more to add. The single slowest component of your computer is your hard drive. I have been harping on this since 1992. Now, I hope you can follow the mantra with a BIG smile on your face after installing your OS on this great new technology. The single LARGEST improvement to computer performance in 2009.

I got a couple of these to test and use in specific applications. Also, for kicks, I tried to install in a Dell laptop drive bay and found the ssd was too thick...but I digress.

I'm using one of these in a Clark Connect firewall as a dedicated Squid cache, and the performance is beyond expectations. I'll probably raid two of these for a higher use Squid I'm putting together later this year in a higher use part of our infrastructure.

We're talking sub-second downloads of squid-cached 3-4MB files onto a older low end P4 desktop.

On top of everything, they are quiet, cool, and have no moving parts. Very green.

I consider this type of drive the _only_ sensible high IO server storage to turn to within two or three years. Will Google use it? No. Many large arrays are more sensible ...and _fast_enough_. But for many organizations, internal servers in particular that have high IO needs will become SSD based, have no doubt. Platter drives will be increasingly relegated to backup and long-term storage, storage farms, etc.

A near apples to apples use comparison, cost and performance ways, would be to fibre-channel storage. iSCSI plus SSD = Fibre-Channel killer.