Customer Reviews

Intel X25-M Mainstream 160GB SATA 2.5-Inch MLC Solid State Drive

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

 

 

I upgraded an intel 2.4ghz IMAC which had a Hitachi 7200RPM drive in it. The speed of this drive over a regular hard drive is night and day. I ran xbench 1.3 with my original drive and got a score of 64 which is average for these type of drives. With the new Intel drive I now get a score of 255. The boot time with this drive is less then 10 sec. and makes the machine blazingly fast. It takes me longer to get through the BIOS load during the boot process then it actually takes to get to the desktop.

I like the firmware upgrade of this drive over the OCZ Vertex. For MAC users this can be very import. For the intel drive you burn an ISO to a CD then boot your MAC/PC off the CD and update your drive. The update also does not delete the data you already have on the drive saving you a rebuild. For the OCZ you have to remove the drive and install a pin so you can update the drive. You then have to boot into a Windows OS to run the firmware upgrade. The firmware upgrade for the OCZ DOES delete the drive causing you to have to rebuild it.

Make sure if you do get one of these Intel drives it is running at least firmware 8820. This firmware addresses some fragmentation issues causing the drive to lose performance over time.

This drive is very fast. (Note, the linux optimizations I have included at the end of the review.) However, one might get confused when reviewing the technical specifications of this drive and comparing them to the specifications of the rebranded samsung drives that now come in capacities as high as 250 GB. I really would prefer the larger size, but after a lot of research I discovered that the benchmark data for the rebranded (non-Intel) drives are done using hypothetical non-real world scenarios. From what I have learned the Intel X25-M can handle multiple read/writes much more efficiently then the other SSD drives. With most usage scenarios a modern operating system will have multiple files open. Finally, with respect to price/performance I believe this drive is a reasonable purchase if: (1) you want a fast laptop, (2) you want more storage then the 80 Gig model which is about 40% of the cost of this drive, and (3) power consumption is an issue (for example you need to travel alot and you hate running out of power). Considering 8 GB of DDR3 memory for a T500 is about the same price, I consider the cost consistent with other premium laptop components. Optimizations for linux: (a) replace relatime with noatime in fstab; (b) add the following to fstab tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0 (uses memory as a buffer for tmp); and (c) elevator=deadline as a kernel boot parameter.

This drive is blazing fast, and I love it except for one problem: any firmware older than 8820 has a fragmentation issue that causes serious performance degradation. Intel fixed this issue with the 8820 firmware version. My problem is that it's been impossible for me to upgrade the firmware because the necessary BIOS changes are locked out on my brand new HP laptop. I've tried to upgrade the firmware by installing the drive in 3 other computers and boot from the image update CD, but the update software will not recognize the drive in any of them even though the drive subsequently mounts on the desktop. I'm returning this for another with the current firmware.

All in all, though, this is a great product: programs that took 30 seconds to load seem to open instantaneously. It runs silent and cool. Just check the firmware version in the upper right corner of the drive's label. Depending on your system, you might have difficulty performing an update. Also, don't format these drives: formatting writes a pattern to every sector and will degrade performance.

Wow. This product has singlehandedly rejuvenated my computer! I have a relatively old thinkpad t61 and I don't think it has ever been faster. Everything just POPS. Want to open a Word document --> blink. done. Open an AVI file. Doubleclick and... Bam.

The hard drive's screaming performance is just incredible. In fact, I first thought that my computer could never be so fast, but... you really have to try it to believe it.

The only con is the price. The 160gb version is very expensive... but in the end, for me, at least, it has been well worth it. (FYI I'm sure prices will come down in the future...)

Good luck!

While it lasted, it was quick and instantaneously responsive, so I can't give it a single star.

Now, it's dead, though, and that means I can't get any data off of it (yes I do run backups). Tech Tool Pro, Disk Utility-- nothing can report it now; it's clinically dead. Alas, I cannot recommend this product, and you will find more backup if you search for this failure.

I place one of these into my (first version) MacPro. It requires an expensive 58 dollar tray to install correctly.

I used a Raptor for my first drive and the Intel for my second drive, leaving slots 3 and 4 for older Raptors I had lying around.

I was surprised to see that I could use Boot Camp to put Vista on the Intel AS LONG as it was in slot 2 and NOT being used as a primary drive as well.

Well I have to say, I have never been as impressed with Vista as I am now. It loads instantly, no more terminal waits and read writes are fast. I am not a guy who depends on objective tests (except for raids, where I am dependent on speed for video) but subjective evaluation.

I did this install because my original slot 1 drive crashed and I figure might as well try. My first attempt was using the SSD in slot 1 for both Mac and Vista, but it would not allow me to install both-apparently a known issue. However, I was very surprised and delighted to see that I could use it as a sole partition for Vista in Bootcamp.

I tend to use Vista for photo editing and Mac for video. I move my large 1DsMKIII images over to the main drive prior to editing and have to say that performance has dramatically increased. This is real world performance and not bench testing. These are really big files. I also noticed that after applying the firmware update, I was able to eradicate the annoying "bus calls" to the back plane of the computer that would always cause a call to the drive to slot 1.

Couldn't be happier. Highly recommended to those using PS.

Well I got my Intel 160GB X-25M from Amazon. Don't ask how much it cost, thats a very sad story (needless to say, that means higher than what it is now).

I just got it running on my Intel iMac. Was not very sure how to take out the internal drive (looks damm complicated), so I hooked it up via Firewire 400. The Firewire 400Mbps interface will probably be the bottleneck, but I'm just trying it to see how it works.

Quickbench scores show the internal drive get around 40+MB/s through put on sequential read and write. The Intel X-25 got around 30+MB/s. On sequential read and rights, the internal drive got around 12+MB/s, while the Intel got 24+MB/s. So obviously the Intel is getting choked by Firewire, getting no where near the 250MB/s read and 70MB/s write.

But how does it really perform in real life scores. Look at the results below. Despite the Firewire choking the Intel, the Intel blows away the internal Seagate drive.

Mac OS X 10.5.6. Intel iMac 1.86GHz, 4GB RAM
Internal Seagate ST3250824AS via SATA1 / Intel X-25M 160GB via Firewire 400

Launch Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 - 12.0 / 6.2 sec
Launch Microsoft Word 2008 - 12.0 / 4.2 sec
Launch Microsoft Excel 2008 - 14 / 3.9 sec
Launch Firefox 3.0.6 to launch home page - 30.0 / 5.0 sec
Launch OpenOffice 3.0 - 10 / 6.2 sec
Launch Vuze to see home page - 19.0 / 3.9 sec
Logout - 15.2 / 13.7 sec
Login to all Norton icon appear - 15.0 / 9.0 sec
Restart - 61.5 / 40.0 sec

I also tried launching 30 applications one after another, the Intel handled it with ease. On the internal drive, it was choking.

I'm so excited, just imagine how much better it would be when I get to swap the internal drive and get a 1.5Gbps interface (sadly my iMac only SATA1). So in a new machine with 3Gbps interface (SATA2), there is no doubt the hard drive will be smelling dust.

Been running it now on an older G5 tower and it's been flawless. The improvements are more than notable. The price was a little steep but from what I spent in money I saved in anxiety and waiting... Photoshop takes about 3-5 seconds to fully launch. I couldn't be happier. The downside is ultimately I had to make a cardboard bay mount and tape it down.

-Sequential Uncached
read 60.445mb/sec (256k blocks)
write 31.05mb/sec
-random
write 43.22mb/sec (256k blocks)
read 12.86mb/sec

This compares to my 7200 Seagate Barracuda:
-Sequential Uncached
read 44.605mb/sec
write 30.07mb/sec
-random
write 1.17mb/sec
read .61mb/sec

If I could, I would give this product 4.5 star. I currently own an Memoright 64GB SLC SSD and this one. I would recommend Intel SSD for those people who need larger storage space with well performance. The Intel SSD has better power management than Memoright SSD on my MBP. Memoright SSD suffered from sleep screen mode back to normal while Intel SSD acts like charms. However, Memoright SSD does perform faster than Intel SSD in my experience due to it's high writing rate(120MB/sec). Both are excellent products in my opinion. But go larger space definitely would be a better choice on Mac.

This is a very nice SSD, even if it is a bit slow on the sequential write speeds. Intel is a good company and they seem to thoroughly test their products. This drive just plain works and works well! However, they did recently release a new firmware for this drive to address some issues.

Because of the premium price and competing SSDs which are faster in certain cases such as sequential write speed (like the OCZ Vertex drives) selling for less and/or having more storage, I can only give this SSD 4 stars. It's still a great SSD, just a little overpriced in my opinion (as of May 2009), and that knocks a star off.

On another note, my Dell XPS1530 boots Windows 7 x64 in about 15 seconds with this SSD. That is from when I hit 'Enter' to select the OS to boot at the boot manager to when the login screen appears.

UPDATE 2009-07-21: I wouldn't buy one of these now... Intel is coming out with an update which will be faster, better, and cheaper. Look for it in silver instead of black! It's a second generation (G2) product built on 34nm tech with a slightly updated controller... better, faster, cheaper. It's shipping now but is hard to find... if you can wait a little bit, you'll get a better product for less money. Search for reviews on "Intel X25-M G2".