Intel X25-M 80GB SSD Review

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

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....

It would have been interesting to have compared it against a drive with high areal density of 300gb+ per platter and 32mb cache as well as the raptor.

capacity wise - no competition seeing as the Seagate 3.5" 1.5Tb drive will be available this month for way less that half the price of this SSD...

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 how much performance Intel has gained from MLC chips) but this drive is an earlier generation example and it would have been nice to see how Intel's drive compares to it's direct rival.

Will we see such a comparison by using the Core v2 60 or 120gb drive? After all I don't think TR has yet reviewed this drive and it has been available for sale in the UK for a little while now?