Intel X-25M solid-state drive (80GB)

Intel's X-25M solid-state drive enjoys several advantages over both conventional disk drives and other SSDs, including improvements to data throughput, boot time and notebook battery life. If you can forget about the cost, this is by far the fastest data drive available.
Intel's X-25M solid-state hard drive represents a major leap forward for the solid-state drive category. Although we've heard about the benefits of solid-state hard drives for years — faster access and boot times, improved notebook battery life — Intel's drive raises expectations for the category as a whole. You will most definitely have to pay more for it. Intel's official pricing is US$595 (in quantities of 1,000 units) for our 80GB model — Australian pricing is currently unavailable. However, using the US price for comparison this gives drive the highest cost per gigabyte among competing products. But if improving performance is your main concern, the Intel X-25M is the clear winner, and we recommend it to those for whom price is unimportant.
Instead of storing data on traditional hard disks, solid-state drives use large blocks of flash-based NAND memory, which means these drives have no moving parts to malfunction over time. With no physical platter to spin like traditional hard drives, SSDs are faster at accessing data; they also use less power and generate less heat — something of particular benefit to notebooks.





The data and power connectors on the X-25M look the same as those on a traditional hard drive.
At the time of this review, Intel only offers one 80GB-capacity drive, but it's available in 2.5in. and 1.8in. sizes for compatibility with a variety of modern desktops and notebooks. The Serial ATA data and power inputs on the Intel drive mirror those of other SSDs as well as traditional hard drives, so while you may need drive rails to adapt it to a desktop chassis, the physical cable connections remain unchanged.
As exciting as we find SSDs, and in particular Intel's new model, their limitations are not insignificant to the average user. The price-per-gigabyte of a typical 160GB hard drive is around 10 times less than that of previous-generation solid-state drives, and around 20 times less than that of Intel's new model. That makes the value proposition for Intel's new SSD, from a pure cost-per-gigabyte perspective, very hard to stomach.
You should also keep in mind that because of the nature of flash memory technology, solid-state hard drives have a relatively well-defined time before failure. An article at Icrontic.com called The Hows and Whys of SSDs provides a more in-depth, but also accessible, description of the issue. The gist is that you get about 100,000 read/write cycles before the memory will wear out. As the author, Robert Hallock, puts it: 'While 100,000 cycles seems slight, it's more than 100GB of new information written to the disk every day for five years before approaching failure'. Perhaps your drive usage is more demanding: if so, you'd be wise to weigh it carefully before choosing Intel's expensive new drive.
To test the performance of Intel's X-25M drive, we installed it in a Dell Inspiron E1505 notebook with a 2GHz dual-core processor and 32-bit Windows Vista Ultimate. For comparison we used a 200GB Seagate Momentus notebook hard drive with a 7,200rpm spin speed (most traditional notebook drives spin at 5,400rpm) and a 128GB Patriot Warp V.2 solid-state drive.
First, we installed Windows Vista Ultimate separately onto each clean drive and copied over our standard 10GB folder that we use for all hard-drive benchmark tests. Next, we performed a combined read and write test by measuring the time it took for the hard drive to copy all 10GB to another folder on the disk. We also ran our notebook battery drain test, which gauges how long a system will last on battery power while playing a movie. Finally, we subjected each drive to a boot speed test, hand-timing how long it took to go from pressing the power button to a ready-to-go-Windows cursor.


Verdict
The Intel X-25M was the clear winner on every test. Its read/write access speed was just under twice as fast as either the Patriot solid-state drive or Seagate's 7,200rpm notebook hard drive. We're also particularly impressed by the battery drain test, in which the Intel drive kept our Dell notebook running for almost 20 minutes longer than its competition. And although its boot time advantage might be less dramatic, the Intel drive still maintained an observable edge. The verdict is clear, then: the Intel drive is faster, and will keep your notebook running longer, than either a traditional hard drive or its solid-state competition.
It might not be surprising that the X-25M outperformed a traditional hard drive, but we were impressed at the extent to which the Intel drive surpassed the Patriot SSD. Intel attributes its advantage to a ground-up design philosophy that's more thorough than its SSD competitors. If the proof is in the benchmarks, Intel seems to have achieved its goal. However, the prices need to come way down on solid-state drives before they achieve mainstream acceptance. The capacity also needs to increase for them to compete with standard hard drives for the sheer amount of data they can hold. But for travellers, digital media creators, gamers — or anyone for whom performance and/or battery life are the most important factors in buying or building a computer — Intel's X-25M has shown that it is at least the best-performing internal storage device on the market.