Customer Reviews

Intel 80 GB X25M Mainstream MLC 2.5 Inch SATA II Solid State Drive (SSD)

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Purchased this drive to go in my Lenovo Ideapad U330. The performance is awesome. The drive is silent since there's no moving parts. Using a SSD also decrease the heat output and energy usage also. The computer is much cooler and uses less energy than before, thus longer battery life. Before this, I had also purchased an OCZ Core 64GB SSD to use in my new Lenovo at $280. That drive, the OCZ Core, was horrible, the performance on HD Tach was 130MB/sec which is good, but it wasn't the benchmark performance that was bad, it was real world use. To use the OCZ drive as a primary OS drive was impossible. It was plague with stops and stutters. Most of the good reviews about how SSD was so fast are from users using an SLC (single level cell) drive. Usually an OCZ SSD or a G.Skill SSD in a sivler case both of which are a rebranded Samsung drive.
This Intel drive is a MLC (multi level cell) drive but intel developed a new technology on how the drive is read and write so it does not suffer from stutters like other MLC drive. This drive performance on HD Tach was equivalent to a RAID (0): SATA WD Raptor 74GB drive at 10,000 rpm. The benchmark on the Intel: Burst speed: 194.4 MB/sec, Average read: 114.3 MB/sec, Random Access: 0.3ms. The benchmark on the Raptor was Burst speed: 197.9 MB/sec, Average read: 110.6 MB/sec and Random Access: 8.6ms. As you can see this drive improves laptop performace by quite a bit. Worth every penny.

I bought this SSD to place into a new laptop I purchased (Samsung X460). However, prior to using the new laptop I figured I would install this SSD in my old laptop first, just to see if it made a difference. It did! Vista now boots in about 15 Seconds and shuts down in about 5 seconds! No more need for hibernate mode! Word documents open immediately! Visual Studio projects that used to take 10-20 seconds to open now open in 1-2 seconds! IE opens immediately! The list goes on and on! Needless to say I'm very happy with the results so I returned the new laptop unopened and kept my money.

This drive is by far the best upgrade I have ever performed. Since installing it my laptop now runs substantially cooler. It used to get so hot in my lap but not anymore! I will never go back to spinning drives again!

The only con I can find about this drive is the storage size. It would be nice to have 120gb+ drive but as of today the larger Intel drive is simply too expensive. To be sure, there are larger drives out there from other manufacturers, but in this price range none come close to the performance of the Intel drive. However, my laptop does have an SD card reader so I slapped in a 16GB SDHC Class 6 card to help out. I use the SD card to hold my music files and other data files. It works out perfect!

Again, I highly recommend this SSD. For the price it is the fastest SSD available. The bottleneck in most computers is the hard drive. This item addresses that issue.

Performance Tips(to try): If you have enough RAM(3+GB), disable virtual memory. You can also disable pre-fetch. For further improvements, just Google "SSD Optimization Tips." Most operating systems were designed to work with spinning hard drives and some of that stuff may hinder the speed of a SSD.

I have to say that this is undoubtably the most amazing improvement that I've made in my system in as long as I can remember. The only thing that I can remember like this is the time that I bought a 3Dfx Voodoo 3D card and used it to play my first 3D accelerated game.

Vista 64 boots to the desktop in ~22 seconds from the "press any key to boot from CD" until the desktop appears. And the system is immediately responsive when the desktop appears - you can click on things and they come right up as if Vista's not busy loading a whole lot of stuff. The drive is absolutely quiet - which is a bit weird actually - but weird in a nice way. It's completely cool - in fact, it's made out of metal that feels like thick brushed aluminum and it feels cold to the touch. I'm a gamer and Warhammer launches in literally half the time that it used to and the loading sequences between zones feels much faster than it used to. Everything feels much faster than it used to. Even little programs like iTunes, and Firefox that never felt particularly slow feel like they are way faster to load and come up.

I'm upgrading from a Hitatchi 1TB Deskstar - I presume if I had a WD Raptor or Velociraptor, or some RAID0 setup that I wouldn't be so impressed. But coming off of a fairly fast single 7200rpm 1TB drive, this drive is a massive improvement


On the negatives, well, 80GB is pretty small. I had a hard time fitting my Vista Ultimate 64 directory tree, my Program Files and Program Files (x86) directories onto it with room to spare for a couple of my favorite games. I have about 7GB free. And there's still a bunch of games that are left on my "old" 1TB drive. It's supposed to be low power - but 80GB is too little for me to actually use (my photo library alone is 300GB.. the problem of RAW mode and a DSLR), so I have to keep my 1TB drive plugged in. So about the best that I can say is that it probably doesn't add a lot more power to my system. It's also extremely expensive for the capacity you get.

But aside from the small capacity and the cringingly high retail price, I am amazed at what a difference it made in my computer..

Fast boot, faster sleep and wake. Splash screens blaze by - blink and you miss them.
Increased battery life by a half hour, Cooler running. No annoying hard drive clicking! Great for multitasking and noticeable improvement in responsiveness. The most eye-opening differences are when doing program installs and in boot/sleep times.

After recently buying a Dell XPS 1530 laptop with an 8600GT graphics card, I noticed the fan noise was very annoying as was the continuous clicking from the hard drive. I like dead silence in my machines but because of many GPU heat failures and upset consumers, Dell had 'upgraded' the Bios to run the fan precisely when the CPU temps hit 55C and the GPU hit 70C to bring them back down by 10 degrees.

All set to return the laptop and get a Macbook, I delayed and installed Windows 7 64 bit beta. Wow, big speed improvement over Vista but the fans and hard drive were still annoying me.
Enter the Intel 74.5GB X25-M. It is a bit pricey but probably saves me a half hour of precious time a day, the fans run much less often, battery life is improved and there's no vibration due to the drive that I can feel while typing. Simply use an external HDD for data. Well worth it especially at the new low price!
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UPDATE 5/31/2011 - X25M in 2011 Macbook pro
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Moved the X25-M into a new Macbook Pro with excellent results since the Dell XPS 1530 now has an unusable display due to the known Nvidia graphics card error.
[While Dell will be "fixing" the XPS, they will be installing a similar graphics card which has already failed for some other users. I won't be getting another Dell and am avoiding Nvidia cards.]
I simply reinstalled Mac OSX over Win7 and it erased, reformatted and reinstalled with no driver issues or fuss. The drive fit perfectly into the Macbook's drive bay. I know the new drives are quicker but since I don't do professional movie editing, it saved me $300 for a new 6gbps drive.

The 2nd generation version of this drive has even better performance at a lower cost.
Intel X25M 80GB Mainstream Solid State Drive Retail Boxed SSDSA2MH080G2R5

I have a 2.5 year old Lenovo T60 which I use for +10h every day.
It has become *very slow* (did install too much crap) with Vista Ultimate and overheated frequently.
Changed to this SSD, had filesystem reindexed and virus full scan and since then: AWESOME!
I wont need a new laptop, my T60 is suddenly faster & more responsive (plus cooler, longer battery life etc...)

I predict that there will be no more harddisk in any serious business notebooks within a year. Really, you have to see it to believe it...
Intel better modify their fabs from pentiums to SSD; who needs a (barely faster) processor if you can double the speed of your old system with the SSD.

Since SSD drives are very expensive, I did an extremely thorough internet research about them.

Bottom line here is what I found:
1- Intel SSD is the fastest and the most SSD drive that will make use of the new SATA2 300Mbps transfer speed, this drive can have a sustained sequential reading speed up to 250Mbps where no other SSD has gone near.
2- In many sites where they were reviewing SSD drives' performance, the Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB 10000RPM outran many of the other SSD brands, except the Intel SSD! (I ended up buying this drive for my C: and the WD velociraptor for my data and games for best performance).

I can't really tell you that my system is booting faster than before, because when I installed this SSD it was in a complete new computer hardware upgrade (I upgraded from P4-HT 3Ghz to i7-965).
But what I can tell you is that I tested converting an 8GB blu-ray movie on both the Velociraptor drive and the SSD: the SSD finished converting in 3 minutes, the Velociraptor in 9 minutes!
Now compare this to how many minutes you will save from your life waiting every day for your computer to boot or to launch programs.

Last but not least, here is a very nice quote I read somewhere on the net, which really summarize the whole SSD concept:
"SSD and normal Hard Disks are like ADSL and Dial-up, once you experience the ADSL there is no way in the world you will go back to dial-up again!"

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UPDATE February 3rd, 2010
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I'm getting into the habit of sharing when I bought the item, the seller name and how much I paid for the drive in order to serve as a price benchmark for anyone who thinks to buy this product later in the future.

I purchased this item from seller AMAZON.COM for the price tag $358.00 on February 25th, 2009.
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END OF UPDATE
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While this upgrade cost nearly 50% of the price of my Lenovo X200 notebook, it's one of the few upgrades I've ever done without being disappointed. The drive is absolutely silent and never at risk of damage while walking about with the notebook running.

The performance increase is noticeable and I run both Vista and Win7 with ease. The drive achieves a 7.4 on Win7's Experience Index benchmark for disk drives. Low-level benchmarks show read speeds approaching 240mb/sec and writes approaching 80mb/sec.

As the price drops, this drive (or its 160gig variant) will become a no-brainer.

I've used this drive in three machines with varying success: An HP DL145 server, a Unibody MacBook Pro, and a Lenovo T61p.

I originally bought the drive for use in the HP server, but it wouldn't even POST with the drive attached. Checked for BIOS updates, etc, but had no luck.

I then tried it in my MacBook Pro (2009) and found that while OS X worked wonderfully, I couldn't install Windows. It seems the Apple EFI BIOS emulation used for Boot Camp doesn't support the drive. This was a serious bummer.

Finally, running out of machines, I tried it in my aging T61p. It breathed new life into the machine. Everything is substantially (subjectively) faster. Even emptying the Recycle Bin is now CPU bound! Subversion is now network and CPU bound. It's wonderful.

In summary, the drive is glorious when it works. It just isn't a drop in replacement for any SATA drive.

The X-25 has been very good for a first generation product. It's very fast and using it for the boot drive in my system made the system silent most of the time. The only downside is cost, but that is soon forgotten and all that is left is the incredible speed and silence.

Intel has now introduced the G2 version with TRIM to "recondition" the cells periodically. If you are buying an X-25 today make certain you get the G2 version even if it's a few bucks more.