DailyTech - 9/8/2008 Daily Hardware Reviews -- Intel X25-M Solid State Drive Edition

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Hardware 9/8/2008 Daily Hardware Reviews -- Intel X25-M Solid State Drive Edition
Brandon Hill (Blog) - September 8, 2008 11:26 AM

22 comment(s) - last by atrabilious.. on Sep 9 at 2:47 PM

Intel X25-M Solid State Drive @ AnandTech

DailyTech's roundup of hardware reviews from around the web for Thursday

Intel X25-M Solid State Drive
@ AnandTech
@ Hot Hardware
@ PC Perspective
@ The Tech Report
@ Legit Reviews
@ Bootdaily

Motherboards
Foxconn A7DA-S 790GX @ OCC
Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R Motherboard @ Hardware Logic
Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R Intel P45 DDR3 Motherboard @ ThinkComputers.org
Foxconn DigitaLife ELA Motherboard @ Elite Bastards
ASUS EPU 6 vs. MSI DrMOS vs. GIGABYTE DES Advanced @ TweakTown

Video
Palit Radeon HD4870X2 Videocard @ PCSTATS.com
AMD HD4870 X2 Crossfire @ t-break
ATI HD Radeon 4850 vs NVIDIA Geforce 9800 GTX @ Madshrimps
HIS Radeon HD4970x2 @ Overclocker Cafe

Storage
Super Talent PICO - C Gold 8 gig - Limited Edition @ XtremeComputing

Peripherals
Creative X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty @ PureOverclock
Razer Lachesis 4000DPI Mouse @ Phoronix

Cases
Raidmax Iceberg Mid Tower @ Pro-Clockers

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Seems like Intel...

By heffeque on 9/8/2008 12:11:14 PM , Rating: 2

Seems like Intel has done a pretty good job with its first SSD. GB/$ is still lagging compared to the mechanical drives, but speed/$ is actually impressive, specially for web-servers, etc.

RE: Seems like Intel...

By Polynikes on 9/8/2008 12:35:29 PM , Rating: 2

I agree. I was a bit skeptical when early reports said Intel's SSDs would have 250gb/s read speeds, but they did it.

I can't WAIT to see what they can do with SLC SSDs.

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RE: Seems like Intel...

By Polynikes on 9/8/2008 12:36:55 PM , Rating: 2

Wow, gb/s... Right... That should've been MB/s.

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RE: Seems like Intel...

By theendofallsongs on 9/8/2008 8:11:07 PM , Rating: 2

The specs look fantastic on paper. But when you actually bench the systems themselves, you don't see anything but small gains. It's really surprising to me. How can this be so much faster, and Windows only boots a couple seconds faster than with a normal disc?

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RE: Seems like Intel...

By atrabilious on 9/9/2008 2:47:11 PM , Rating: 2

Most of the windows boot time is spent waiting on hardware to initiatize and other crap.

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RE: Seems like Intel...

By AntiM on 9/8/2008 1:09:00 PM , Rating: 2

From The Tech Report article:

Intel has, however, confirmed that the 80GB X25-M will sell for $595 in 1,000-unit quantities.

Yikes! A little too pricey for me. I think I'll wait until the 3rd or 4th generation SSDs come out. Probably twice the capacity at half the price. Not to mention other potential improvments.

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RE: Seems like Intel...

By therealnickdanger on 9/8/2008 7:43:40 PM , Rating: 2

I know I've said this MANY times before:

In 2003, the WD360GD Western Digital Raptor 36GB 10,000 RPM hard drive was THE enthusiast drive to buy and cost $270 (it may have even debuted at $300, but I don't recall). That's $7/GB for performance far beneath this new Intel SSD which, coincidentally, has the same cost per gigabyte!

IMO, the Intel SSD is worth every penny.

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RE: Seems like Intel...

By walk2k on 9/8/2008 2:27:16 PM , Rating: 4

These make horrible OS drives because of the extremely poor small file IO.

Read this article before you think about using one of these as your main OS drive. Absolutely DO NOT use them for your swap file!

http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106

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RE: Seems like Intel...

By Polynikes on 9/8/2008 6:49:59 PM , Rating: 2

Swap file? Who uses that nowadays? :)

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RE: Seems like Intel...

By Zshazz on 9/8/2008 9:58:18 PM , Rating: 2

http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80G...

OCZ Core's IOps: 22
X25M's IOps: 3778

Whelp, the problem mentioned isn't applicable to these new drives, it seems. More than 171x faster at what they use to suck at :D

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Intel SSD

By pauldovi on 9/8/08, Rating: 0

RE: Intel SSD

By Brandon Hill

(blog) on 9/8/2008 12:45:14 PM , Rating: 2

How can the new Intel SSDs (which will be available in 80GB and 160GB capacities) be available in 64GB and 128GB notebooks?

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RE: Intel SSD

By Oregonian2 on 9/8/2008 1:23:07 PM , Rating: 2

The 80GB may not work in the 128GB notebook, but it'd do fine in the 64GB one with a lot of additional bad-block swapping blocks for additional long term reliability.

:-)

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RE: Intel SSD

By pauldovi on 9/8/2008 2:03:58 PM , Rating: 2

You are confusing Intel OEM products with retail products. Intel often sells specialized products to OEM's. Like the Core 2 Duo found in both the Mac Book Air and the X300.

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RE: Intel SSD

By Brandon Hill

(blog) on 9/8/2008 2:43:45 PM , Rating: 2

I'm sorry, but you are still wrong. The X301 uses Samsung SSDs, not Intel SSDs.

Intel's SSDs are not available in 64GB or 128GB capacities in retail or OEM configurations.

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RE: Intel SSD

By pauldovi on 9/8/2008 4:10:10 PM , Rating: 2

http://www.gottabemobile.com/GBM+InkShow+The+Lenov...

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RE: Intel SSD

By Brandon Hill

(blog) on 9/8/2008 4:25:32 PM , Rating: 2

That information is incorrect. Even the people in the comments section point out the error.

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HIS Radeon

By Radnor on 9/8/2008 1:44:07 PM , Rating: 1

HIS Radeon 4970x2 !!! Holy GPU Batman !!

Can i see reviews of Nehalem vs Bulldozer Architectures?

Please?

RE: HIS Radeon

By amanojaku on 9/8/2008 3:17:49 PM , Rating: 2

Only if HE judges you to be worthy of the Holy Benchmark. ;-)

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Tasty

By icanhascpu on 9/8/2008 2:48:12 PM , Rating: 2

Anyone else feel it would be a crime to hide these beautiful things inside your case? I want to build a case entirely made of these.

Not really impressed...

By daar on 9/8/2008 7:11:04 PM , Rating: 2

...unless the firmware in the drives were tailored for the server market? Games and consumer apps aren't much faster, even slower than the older SSD's in some cases.