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Intel X25-M SSD

Author	Edward Chester
Published	17th Sep 2008
Manufacturer	Intel
Price	£295.65 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed	£340.00 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price	Click here

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Ever since we first heard the news, we've been giddy with anticipation at the prospect of Intel moving into the SSD market. With its expertise in all manner of integrated circuit design and its massive fabrication capability, if anyone could turn these much hailed mass storage devices from an expensive niche product into a truly mainstream commodity then Intel was it.

Now, finally, these drives are here. Well actually they're not quite available in the shops yet - for that we'll have to wait a few months still - but we do at least have one in our office for testing.

As Hugo reported on the day of their official launch, the eventual line-up will consist of two basic ranges dubbed E and M. The former will be the flagship, performance range and will come in 32GB and 64GB flavours and have sustained read and write speeds of 240MB/s and 170MB/s respectively. The (M)ainstream range, meanwhile, will be available in rather more attractive 80GB and 160GB capacities, with drive size of 1.8inch (X18) and 2.5inch (X25), but will only have read speeds of 250MB/s and write speeds of 70MB/s. Today we're looking at the 80GB X25-M.

To understand the differences between the two ranges we have to get a little technical. You see, all flash memory devices are based on the same basic building block, the floating-gate transistor.

Essentially, the floating gate stores electrons and it's the number of these electrons that determines the threshold voltage of the cell. It's this voltage that is then measured to determine the state of the cell. When the threshold voltage is above 5.0V, say, the cell is read as erased (yes, it's the opposite way round to how you'd expect). Below 5V, the cell is seen as being programmed.

This type of memory is called Single Level Cell, as the transistor has only one threshold voltage so can store only one bit - the cell is either charged or not.

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Peter Morris said on 17th September 2008

Thanks for the review, Ed. I work in professional audio and have ben testing fast USB drives as my audio disk for sometime with mixed results...

My need is for a drive that is always ready and has the fastest R/W possible so that multiple audio tracks can be read and written simultaneously. Simple enough and the fast HDDs do the job - up to a point. Typically a pro rig will have 1 disk for the system (including Logic, Pro Tools or other audio app), 1 disk for samples & virtual instruments, 1 disk for recording and playing back audio and 1 disk for video content (when scoring to film for example). A combination of internal disks and FW800 so as not to flood a single bus normally works well.

What concerns me is the inexplicable hits that SSDs sometimes take. I can understand it when an app has ben swapped out, when memory has ben paged out, when an HDD has spun down or encounters RPS latency. What causes the X25-M to take a bath on Windows shutdown? It's 60% slower than the Velociraptor. I've read other reviews that also have an inexplicable hit but in other areas. It's almost as if there is some kind of occasional initialisation issue or bottleneck.

It's hard to say to an artist: "Sorry - system fault. I lost that great take" so instabilities are far worse than predictable but inferior performance. There are strategies when the system behaves predictably but not when there are glitches.

Long preamble to a short question: are there glitches in SSD performance? Perhaps these are masked or averaged out in multiple tests but might manifest themselves according to Murphy's Law. What of the Windows Shutdown anomaly? Any ideas?

I'll still try it anyway, of course. When simultaneously reading and writing audio from the same disk (even with decent size buffers), the head movement is something I'd like to eliminate so that part of it is a no-brainer. As for capacity, the audio disk seldom needs to be bigger than 20GB for a recording session. I would archive after every session to RAID, whether using Velociraptor or SSD. 80GB is fine for work in progress.

Cheers!

Pete

Thanks for the review, Ed. I work in professional audio and have ben testing fast USB drives as my audio disk for sometime with mixed results...

My need is for a dr... more

HSC said on 17th September 2008

agree - need to be way cheaper
but only use I can see over a mechanical drive is in laptops, silent media pc's or if you need the ultimate performance....

... more

Simon Johns said on 17th September 2008

Is there any reason why the Intel drive was not matched against the latest OCZ Core 2 SSD? I appreciate that the OCZ drive uses the faster SLC chips (and clearly demonstrates just ... more

Ed said on 17th September 2008

@Simon

It wasn't a conscious decision to not compare the OCZ core range, we just haven't received one yet. From what I gather, though, the core drives are... more

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