Intel X25-M 80GB SSD

The Intel X25-M-80GB drive is meant to be the mainstream drive that brings SSDs to mass market. It has a 2.5-inch form factor similar to latop hard disks. Enthuasistswould take to this drive right away considering that it makes no noise at all and doesn’t heat up. It helps conserve power too, with its rated usage of 60 mW (milliwats) at idle and 150mW during read/write operations, this is about one-hundredth of normal desktop HDDs. In synthetic benchmarks, read speeds averaged a consistent 174.4 MBps – right across the drive, without ever dip in the speed graph. Write speeds averaged a consistent 75.7 MBps with a CPU utilization of 5 percent. Random access times averaged 0.23 ms. In comparasion, most desktop drives average 75 MBps read, 60 MBps write, and 12 ms random access time.

Real world write speed while copying a single large 6.42GB onto the SSD stood at 73.86 MBps. Copying mulitiple smaller files (800 files totaling up to 6.36 GB) onto the SSD was almost the same speed, at 73.17. The reverse, copying files from the SSD onto the Velociraptor was almostchild’s play since the SSD supplied data at 216MBps and the limitation was the Velociraptor’s write speed! Copying multiple small files from one partition to another was at 51.28 MBps. An area where you can notice a large performance difference was application sturtup times (almost instantly). The only reason this SSD doesn’t get an even higher rating, is the price ($360 approx.). Also, the current generation of high capacity magnetic HDDs easily exceed its sequential write speed and are much cheaper. However, if you can afford it, this is ideal for usage as an OS drive. Intel offers a limited warranty of 3 years on this drive.