Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2008 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Final Words
At the high level, SSDs are still the key to truly solid performance and this is where the issues with the JMicron based MLC drives are really unfortunate, because it means that the most accessible SSDs on the market can actually deliver a pretty bad user experience. But if you look at what Intel's X25-M and the Samsung SLC drives can deliver, it's really quite good.
As I've mentioned before, the random write issues with JMicron JMF602 based MLC SSDs are simply unacceptable and in my opinion they make the drives unusable for use in any desktop or notebook that you actually care about. Next year we may see a JMicron controller that fixes the problem but until then, I'd consider those drives off limits.
This thing is fast, and I want one in my system...actually, two. It's the only SSD that I would actually go out, buy and stick in my desktop machine at this point. I think that's the first time I've ever said something like that in a review, but I'm absolutely convinced. I've been using SSDs in my systems for a few months now and I'm hooked.
What Intel did with the X25-M is show the world what is possible with MLC flash. You get better than SLC performance, at lower than SLC prices. Despite that, the absolute only thing that bothers me about Intel's X25-M is the price. Although Intel is totally justified in pricing the X25-M at $595, I was hoping for pricing inline with the JMicron based MLC SSDs. At $300 - $400 this would be a no brainer for any enthusiast, and honestly even at $595 it's worth considering if you have other drives for data storage.
The other complaint is obviously capacity; at 80GB you can get by with this being the only drive in a corporate notebook or even your personal notebook if you've got external storage, but in a desktop machine 80GB is a bit shallow. Thankfully with better reliability than conventional hard disks you should be able to put two of these in RAID 0, doubling capacity without any fear of reduced reliability. Then we get back to the pricing problem unfortunately.
If Intel can get capacities over 100GB at reasonable prices in the near future, I'd say that the X25-M would be the best upgrade you could possibly do to your system. I'm curious to see what pricing and availability will be like for the 160GB drives, but Intel is being pretty tight lipped about them.
The implications of the X25-M are tremendous. I mentioned before that it is the great equalizer between the notebook and desktop, you can finally have a desktop usage experience on your notebook if you've got one of these in there (or a SLC SSD). If capacities grow quickly enough, these SSDs could mean that desktops would start accepting 2.5" drives, allowing for smaller form factors. Apple is already doing this on the Mac mini, and we've seen 2.5" drives used in systems like the ASUS Eee Box, but now you don't have to give up performance.
Intel didn't start the SSD revolution but it sure did kick it into high gear. Companies like Samsung and JMicron are really going to have to step up their game if they want to compete with Intel going forward. While Intel was light on details about the tricks they implemented in their controller, it's clearly enough to completely change the way we look at MLC SSD performance. And if this is the sort of performance we can expect out of its MLC drive, I'm wondering what will happen when we look at its SLC drives.
To me this is bigger than Nehalem, but then I look at the price tag and think that Nehalem will probably be a cheaper upgrade. Intel redefined the performance of the MLC SSD, I only wish they also redefined the price...
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Alleniv - Wednesday, August 19, 2009 - link
Hi all,I report this new review about X25-M, that takes in consideration a comparative with other SSDs and also with HDDs, with several benchmarks ? http://www.informaticaeasy.net/le-mi...m-da-80gb.h...">http://www.informaticaeasy.net/le-mi...m-da-80gb.h...
Bytales - Saturday, January 3, 2009 - link
You said this: For example, let's say you download a 2MB file to your band new, never been used SSD, which gets saved to blocks 10, 11, 12 and 13. You realize you downloaded the wrong file and delete it, then go off to download the right file. Rather than write the new file to blocks 10, 11, 12 and 13, the flash controller will write to blocks 14, 15, 16 and 17. In fact, those four blocks won't get used again until every other block on the drive has been written to onceBy this i understand that a bigger capacity SSD, for instance 320 vs 160 will have more blocks and hence you will need more writes to deplete the number a write cycles the SSD was designed for. So for SSD bigger means even longer lasting. IS this TRUE ?
lpaster - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Can you overclock this SSD?Sendou - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - link
There are optimization methods available for SSD's which can mitigate performance loss through genuine usage over time.One such is Diskeeper's HyperFast Technology.
There is a white paper regarding HyperFast available at:
http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/Optimizing-Soli...
BludBaut - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
I read the pdf article you linked from Diskeeper.Based on the information Anand has given in his articles about Intel's technology, Diskeeper's "whitepaper" sounds like crap advertising by a company who's afraid their technology might be considered not only useless but detrimental to use with SSDs. I'm inclined to agree since Diskeeper's own results show a 4x write loss by just *one* "optimization" while Anand's article clearly suggests that the proper design (which he says Intel has accomplished) eliminates the need for Diskeeper's service.
Until I find more thorough examination of the facts, Diskeeper's remarks make me distrust them.
On the other hand, Anand's article definitely sounds not just like a puff piece for Intel, but qualifies in my mind as advertising. Wonder how much money Intel has spent on Anandtech? That's not to suggest that anything is misrepresentative (well, it wasn't meant to sound that way, but keep reading and you'll find the one-sided praise will later be partially retracted and I don't know the end of the story yet), but we all know that advertising always leaves out the negatives.
(Reviews shouldn't sound like advertisements but anyone who's been reading magazine reviews for 30 years knows that's frequently the case. The reviewer's bills get paid by the manufacturers' of the products he's reviewing. But, the reviewer is objective of course. It's a matter of journalistic integrity. Yeah, I believe that. Don't you?)
One such negative was the promotion of the life of the drive. "20GB a day for five years"? Anand praises Intel for multiplying that by five to "100GB a day for five years" but then tells us that they'll only guarantee the drive for three years and has the audacity to suggest we'll likely have a recourse "if we can prove" ... -- how is anyone going to prove how many GBs a day they put on their computer? The annoyance of trying to keep track is not something 99% of people would do.
Did you do the math to see how long it takes to write 100GB to a drive with a write speed of 200MB/s? Eight minutes and twenty seconds is all it takes.
Well, that's great if all you use your computer for is reading articles, checking the news and sales prices and sending email. The drive should last as long as your computer. But if you love video (who loves video???), it's a different story entirely.
There's another negative that, though first denied, eventually was acknowledged. More than six months later, Anand reports back and says essentially, 'Intel is still the best but the performance does degrade with time and I don't know why.' If he's explained it since then, I've yet to read it.
So, for those just reading the article, don't get so encouraged that you start drooling. The article has a tendency to make one think, "What am I waiting for? I want one of these puppies!" Unfortunately, Intel's technology isn't as rosy and bulletproof and Anand made it sound.
kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
I hope you do some benchmark on Samsung's new 256GB SSD. Hopefully it's as good as Intel's.kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
its read/write speed is 200/160 mb/s. Will it sustain that speed in a multi applications running environment??kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
sorryread/write speed is 220/200 mb/s.
scotopicvision - Monday, November 10, 2008 - link
The article was an amazing read, fantastic, and well done thank you.D111 - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
Legacy OS like Windows Vista, XP, and Applications like Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, etc. have built in, inherent flaws with regard to SSDs.
Specifically, optimizations of these OS for mechanical hard drives like superfetch, prefetch, etc. tend to slow down, rather than help performance and is unnecessary to speed up reads in an SSD, but slow it down with unnecessary writes of small files, which SSDs are slower than a regular hard drive.
Things like automatic drive defragmentation with Vista does nothing for SSDs except to slow them down.
Properly optimized, even low cost 2007 generation SSDs test out as equivalent to a 7200 rpm consumer grade drive, and typical SSDs made in 2008 or later tend to outperform mechanical hard drives.
The tests done here have done nothing to "tweak" the OS to remove design hindrances to SSD performance, and thus, have no validity or technical merit.
The test, as presented, would be similar to installing a 19th century steam engine on a sailing ship, and observing that it is rather slow ---- without mentioning the drag and performance hits caused by the unused sail rigging, masts, etc.
See the discussion here for a detailed discussion of SSD performance tweaks and what it takes to make them perform well with legacy OS and Applications.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdispl...">http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum...display....