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Intel refreshes X25-M pricing, adds new model

Solid state drives (SSDs) are quickly becoming commonplace in the enthusiast PC market. Those that crave the fastest “do-it-yourself” computers add SSD boot drives to make OS operations and key programs start faster. Notebook manufacturers are also increasingly looking towards SSDs to improve performance and make more svelte designs for consumers.

Intel makes a family of SSDs in both 1.8" and 2.5" form factors, and the company announced today that it is not only cutting the price on its existing offerings, but it is also adding a new model to the lineup as well.

The 160GB X25-M will now retail for $415, while the 80GB version will retail for $199. In addition, a new 120GB model will be introduced with an MSRP of $249.

For those looking for an even cheaper option, the 40GB X25-V will be available for $99.

“Every Christmas, consumers are looking for the latest tech gadget; this year, with prices dropping, the solid-state drive is becoming more mainstream and can make the single greatest improvement to PC performance,” said Troy Winslow, director of product marketing for the Intel NAND Solutions Group. “With an SSD, tech shoppers can give the gift of a technology makeover that will help speed up, or breathe new life, into a current PC by just swapping out the hard drive for an SSD.”

Online prices are retails like Amazon haven't yet been updated to reflect the new prices, but the updates should filter down over the coming days.

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Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By tdktank59 on 11/12/2010 4:48:32 PM , Rating: 5
quote:
The 160GB X25-M will now retail for $415, while the 80GB version will retail for $249. In addition, a new 120GB model will be introduced with an MSRP of $199


That doesn't make sense.. the 120 is cheaper than the 80...




By dusteater on 11/12/2010 4:54:09 PM , Rating: 2
Well, that may be the case if this new model is using the new IMFT hardware, any word on that?


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By DesertCat on 11/12/2010 4:55:24 PM , Rating: 2
Yeah it must be a typo. I followed the link to Intel's site and it says the 80 GB is $199. The 120 GB retail is $249.


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/12/2010 5:00:29 PM , Rating: 3
Oh the sting of being an early adopter!!! I paid that much for my 80 Gen2 lol.

And lovin' every minute of it sooo, guess I can't complain.


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By Drag0nFire on 11/12/2010 5:12:56 PM , Rating: 2
Love mine too. Can't wait until Gen3 comes out!


By corduroygt on 11/12/2010 5:15:27 PM , Rating: 2
I paid $360 for my X25M-G2 160GB 6 months ago. Best upgrade I've ever done.
Hopefully $415 retail will mean <$300 street prices.


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/12/2010 5:41:03 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Love mine too. Can't wait until Gen3 comes out!


Well unless Intel pulls out something amazing with the Gen3's, my next SSD will probably be an OCZ. They have really taken the lead lately and some of their upcoming technology will be amazing.


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By Makaveli on 11/12/2010 6:48:51 PM , Rating: 3
I've seen to many failed OCZ drives to even consider them

And while sandforce's controller is pretty damn good, and scores great in benchmarks. I've heard of issues with it aswell and in real world usage you will have some data it cannot compress and those amazing scores start to drop pretty quick.

Intel is still king for Reliability, no longer the fastest controller but stablity matters more for me right now than a SSD that can does 500/500 read and writes.


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/12/2010 7:21:24 PM , Rating: 1
Well I don't "see" failed SSD's. Apparently you have in your line of work. If you have a link that you could provide me detailing OCZ failing issues, I would be more than happy to read it.

All I know is that every trusted site and forum I use to determine PC hardware has went from the Intel camp to the OCZ camp. I haven't read about any systematic extraordinary failure rates on the new OCZ drives. These things do happen, but it only takes a few unlucky loudmouths to give an entire brand a bad name. I need solid data.

I'm sure to the end user both would be great. It will be a while until I have to make a decision anyway, and lots of things can change. I'm very happy with my Intel currently.


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By lawstcawz on 11/12/10, Rating: 0
RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/12/2010 9:12:10 PM , Rating: 2
Basically their controller is, on paper, the most advanced SSD controller out there.

The controller is really the only crucial component of an SSD. They all use pretty much the same type/quality flash except for those outrageous "Enterprise" class drives.


By Ristogod on 11/15/2010 9:38:22 AM , Rating: 1
Nothing special about OCZ's controller. It's not theirs. It's Sandforces. And it's used in many different branded SSDs, to include Mushkin, Patriot and many others. Not just OCZ. OCZ occasionally has some exclusive firmwares. But it's usually unnoticeable in the real world and not worth their price premium.


By Silver2k7 on 11/13/2010 1:14:45 PM , Rating: 3
"Why OCZ? Nothing special except they charge more."
Does Intel have any SSD with 700MB/s ?


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By BZDTemp on 11/13/2010 12:43:27 PM , Rating: 4
You only say that because you did not get your Intel SSD early enough :-)

It's not like they did not bring grief to some of those early shoppers.


By angryplayer on 11/13/2010 2:23:40 PM , Rating: 2
Every single Intel drive I've owned has failed. *rantrantrant*

(Please ignore the fact I have never purchased an Intel drive and am just embellishing rumors that were probably release by fanbois)

</sarcasm>


By kmmatney on 11/14/2010 7:13:56 PM , Rating: 2
Well, I've purchased 4 Intel SSDs, and now 2 OCZ Agility 2 SSDs, and the OCZ drives seem to work fine. I have not directly tested the drives against each other, but in normal usage, the Intel SSDs seem to be a hair faster. However the OCZ drives, if purchased on sale, offer much more bang for the buck. I don't see any real reason to shy away from an OCZ drive, unless you are running Windows XP. For XP, the Intel drives are better, due to the nice toolkit software.


By PrezWeezy on 11/12/2010 7:19:19 PM , Rating: 2
I would wait. I'm hearing good things...like it might take the crown back.


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By Jeff7181 on 11/12/2010 10:30:17 PM , Rating: 5
OCZ is not what they used to be. They used to be a bunch of enthusiasts creating parts for other enthusiasts. Based on the last couple interactions I've had with their support staff, they're just a bunch of asshats now that refuse to acknowledge a problem with any of their products unless someone like Anand calls them out on a website that gets millions of hits a day.


By Reclaimer77 on 11/13/2010 8:44:03 AM , Rating: 2
That's why I buy from Newegg and other trusted places. If I have a problem, I don't deal with OCZ or whoever. I send it back to Newegg.

quote:
OCZ is not what they used to be. They used to be a bunch of enthusiasts creating parts for other enthusiasts.


Oh please. They were a company making a buck then, their a company making a buck now. And this has no impact on my decision to purchase their products. I will judge them on their merits and what benefits me personally, not what others perceive them to be. I can't let others with their bad experience sob stories sway my hand, those are a dime a dozen on the Internet.


By superstition on 11/14/2010 8:40:20 PM , Rating: 2
I have purchased 7 Rally-2 USB sticks. One, an old 4 GB model, works great. The others, 16 GB models, have big problems -- like having to wait five minutes or more for them to mount in OS X and having to wait for a long time for them to unmount.

I plugged one of them into my Windows 7 box and it wouldn't even load.

I also purchased some Obsidian 1600 RAM and not only did it want BIOS voltage settings that were outside Intel's max spec, they didn't even run reliably at 1066. The replacement RAM "seems" to be working so far, but I am skeptical.

I have not had issues with any brand to the degree I've had with OCZ, although at my school we had a fleet of Dells that went belly-up due to bad caps as well as two bad top-of-the-line laptops. Those problems, though, were years ago.


RE: Sure the 120 is going to be 199?
By Helbore on 11/15/2010 1:40:02 PM , Rating: 2
I recently had to return a faulty OCZ Enyo. Damn thing was near useless as it kept locking up every few seconds.

Anyway, I posted to their support forums about it and they very quickly had me RMA the drive. Replacement came fast and is perfectly fine.

I don't doubt that you may have had issues with their tech support, but my experience has been great with them. Perhaps, as I never dealt with them in the past, their current service isn't a patch on their old service. But it was still good service.


Notebooks?
By dubldwn on 11/12/2010 4:51:33 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
Notebook manufacturers are also increasingly looking towards SSDs to improve performance and make more svelte designs for consumers.

You would think this would be a lot more widespread considering SSD's speed, power consumption, and size (they are generally 2.5" after all) that make these ideal for notebooks. And yet Newegg sells 667 notebooks and all of four (4) of them have SSD's.




RE: Notebooks?
By dusteater on 11/12/2010 4:55:13 PM , Rating: 2
The problem is price. That's the last road block in the way, and hopefully the new IMFT hardware will fix that, as well as longevity.


RE: Notebooks?
By bug77 on 11/12/2010 5:27:55 PM , Rating: 5
Power consumption is not as important as you think. The fastest WD only needs about 2.5W. Meanwhile a mobile i5 CPU needs 35. Even if you cut the HDD power in half, you're not going to get much more battery life. And that's before accounting for the GPU and the display.

Now the $3+/GB, that's a deal-breaker...


RE: Notebooks?
By sdsdv10 on 11/12/2010 7:25:12 PM , Rating: 2
Prices for SSD have been below $2/GB for a little while now, as shown in this link.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow...

Still high compared to platter based drives, but not as bad your comments makes it out to be.


RE: Notebooks?
By StevoLincolnite on 11/12/2010 7:56:21 PM , Rating: 2
Depends on where you live I guess.
Here in little ole' Aus your looking anywhere between $2.40 to $3.20 per gigabyte.
Where-as a trusty and fast Samsung Spinpoint F3 1tb is only 6.9 cents a Gigabyte.
That's still a MASSIVE price discrepancy whichever way you cut the cake, and I imagine the pricing difference would still be fairly large even in the states when you compare a Mechanical and an SSD drive.


RE: Notebooks?
By bug77 on 11/13/2010 4:52:43 AM , Rating: 2
Random pick: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...

2GB for $180. Or $.09/GB. 20x or 30x that much is still a no go for me. Hell, even at 2x it's still a tough choice.

Than there's the capacity problem: most SSDs offer up to 160GB (I know there are larger models available, but they're ridiculously priced). 160GB is peanuts these days, you still need a second HDD.
I want SSD to become mainstream as much as the next guy, but apparently flash technology is not there yet. Ot will be, but it will take several more years...


RE: Notebooks?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/13/10, Rating: 0
RE: Notebooks?
By dark matter on 11/13/2010 12:44:23 PM , Rating: 1
Nobody is saying they must have price parity other than you.
Straw man argument.

If price per gigabyte is a factor for some people, why should they care about manufacturing?
Another straw man.

Agree, SSD's are for performance. However, for most of us the outlay does not warrant the performance boost. For example, I have my machine on sleep. Sure, it would wake faster, but is a few seconds really worth me shelling out 30 times the cost of a normal drive. No. Can I wait a couple of seconds for Photoshop to load. Yes.

Oh, you say its for the OS to speed it up, right? Sure, but you know what else speeds up the OS? Having a lot of RAM. I have 12 Gigabytes. Once the OS is loaded, its loaded dude.

In fact, if I am just browsing the Internet for a few hours all my drives have switched off. I know, because if I save a picture, or download something, I have to wait for them to power up. Now, is it worth that extra money so I can save a picture off the internet is 0.1 second rather than the 2 seconds it takes for my drive to power up? No.

And finally, unless you only have an OS and no data, I bet you also have mechanical drives as well. Unless you're a completely jerk and have all your data on SSD's. In which case you're a prick. Then again, you're a prick anyway because you already know you have mechanical drives.

So enjoy your slow, chugging, spinning platters jerkboy. Oh, for your information, if you have windows 7, it defrags automatically in the background.

And you know something else. Even if you gave me the money to replace my shitty mechanical drives I would tell you to shove it. You know why, because there is no way I could put all those shitty tiny drives in my case to replace the 8 terabytes of capacity in there. (Raid 1 4t mirrored). So shove it you snot nosed little oik.


RE: Notebooks?
By kingmotley on 11/13/2010 4:46:30 PM , Rating: 2
I love nerd rage, especially if they just realized they have a small penis.


RE: Notebooks?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/13/10, Rating: -1
RE: Notebooks?
By JKflipflop98 on 11/16/2010 4:02:06 PM , Rating: 1
Your mom's I/O port is bi-directional.


RE: Notebooks?
By Silver2k7 on 11/13/2010 1:18:44 PM , Rating: 2
"SSD's are for performance, not maximum storage size."

Right now SSD's are small compared to HDD's atleast for the same price brackets. There are large SSD's like 960GB but they are still very expensive.

But it sure would be nice if SSD's took over and there would be one thing less with moving parts in our computers.


RE: Notebooks?
By bug77 on 11/13/2010 5:54:31 PM , Rating: 2
I never said any of that.

Right now there two options:
1. Spend $200 on a HDD that will do its job. It's not the fastest in the world, but it gets the job done (better than it did 5 years ago, I might add).
2. Spend $200 on a cutting edge SSD that is tiny in comparison.

Some may afford to get both, but remember the US has among the highest wages and the lowest prices. So for the rest of the world, SSD are even less attractive.

And don't get me started on the advantages of an SSD. While my PC is on, the HDD is used maybe 20% of the time. That means that for the rst of the 80%, my PC is as fast as it would be with an SSD. Or say you're watching a 2h movie. That's 2h that my HDD and your SSD are on par - the whole thing takes 2h for both of us.

SSDs are the future, but they are niche products right now.


RE: Notebooks?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/13/10, Rating: -1
RE: Notebooks?
By bug77 on 11/13/2010 8:08:44 PM , Rating: 2
Are you just trying to make yourself feel good after blowing your money on one?

My point is 20x the price for 1/20th capacity is ridiculously expensive. What's yours?


RE: Notebooks?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/13/10, Rating: -1
RE: Notebooks?
By bug77 on 11/14/2010 5:23:03 AM , Rating: 2
Yeah, well, a Ferrari is much faster than the average car. The single biggest improvement for getting from point A to point B. No tuning, gasoline change or tire selection equals it. Do you have a Ferrari, too?

And I like the claim that the 20x price premium is an exaggeration, even though I have given you a real-world example previously. FYI, 20x the price for 1/20th the capacity is actually a 400x price premium.


RE: Notebooks?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/14/10, Rating: 0
RE: Notebooks?
By bug77 on 11/14/2010 1:26:44 PM , Rating: 2
What am I not getting? That some things are too expensive?

Why wouldn't I bring that up? Is it not a valid criterion?


RE: Notebooks?
By RedemptionAD on 11/17/2010 9:56:51 AM , Rating: 2
That's the first car argument that I have seen on here in a while that didn't involve perks and a mac vs pc argument. Bravo!!!!


RE: Notebooks?
By bug77 on 11/13/2010 5:57:58 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
SSD's are for performance, not maximum storage size. Enough with the price per gig arguments and comparisons. If you have to bother with that, you just don't GET SSD's.


Last I checked, they were still storage devices, therefore "for maximum storage".
I remember when SSDs first hit the market, some reviewers were having trouble installing both Windows and Crysis on the same SSD.


RE: Notebooks?
By kingmotley on 11/13/2010 12:09:08 PM , Rating: 2
You know, if you care about performance and just want the best $/GB, you can hook up a tape drive to your system. The performance is terrible, but it's about 1/10th the cost of a regular HDD.

Personally, I'd love to see someone using it to boot windows because they are too cheap to buy a HDD.


RE: Notebooks?
By damianrobertjones on 11/12/2010 6:16:58 PM , Rating: 2
You're thinking 'tech' instead of standard Joe in the street

"I have an SSD drive in my laptop"
"What's one of them then?"

My point has been made. (Along with the cost of course)


RE: Notebooks?
By priusone on 11/12/2010 7:09:29 PM , Rating: 2
My buddy sure thought his little netbook was cool since it didn't have one of them hard disc drives in it, instead it had an 8GB SSD. He learned pretty quick that while and SSD may use less power, a 160GB HDD would have been a lot better.


What?
By rudy on 11/12/2010 5:05:26 PM , Rating: 2
No 320 GB model what good is this? Now it seems we can expect instead of a 320GB model we will probably get a 240GB model next.




RE: What?
By inighthawki on 11/12/10, Rating: 0
RE: What?
By Makaveli on 11/12/2010 6:43:46 PM , Rating: 2
RAIDED SSD's = no trim!

So no thanks!

You can rely on idle garbage collection but I won't.


RE: What?
By inighthawki on 11/12/2010 7:15:27 PM , Rating: 2
Fair enough, but my other point still stands, there are still other drives out there, and they are good too.


RE: What?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/12/2010 7:16:05 PM , Rating: 1
I agree. Plus raiding SSD's make no sense. Unless you have the new 6 Gb/s motherboards, a single SSD is almost maxing the SATA interface anyway. The advantages just don't outweigh the drawbacks.

But as you pointed out, the real dealbreaker is the lack of TRIM support if you raid SSD's.


RE: What?
By pwnsweet on 11/12/2010 8:46:14 PM , Rating: 2
I can't speak for other SSD's, but the Intel G1's with the 8820 or newer firmware performed really really well without TRIM. I had one in my laptop for about 6 months and filled it with only 17mb free and then cleaned it up so that about 30GB was free again and let it sit for a a few hours. I then re-ran CrystalDiskMark 3.0 and I was within 5% of new performance.

TRIM is nice to have, but idle garbage collection is just as good. In some respects it's better, because it's OS independent and will work in XP or OS X.


RE: What?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/12/2010 9:14:14 PM , Rating: 4
TRIM isn't for performance, it's for longevity. But it does also improve performance as an SSD becomes full.

Sorry but idle garbage collection is NOT "just as good" as TRIM.


RE: What?
By kingmotley on 11/13/2010 12:04:43 PM , Rating: 1
Sorry, you obviously don't understand how trim works. Trim never increases longevity.


RE: What?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/13/2010 4:39:49 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
Sorry, you obviously don't understand how trim works. Trim never increases longevity.


I think if someone is going to make this statement they should, you know, actually understand how SSD's work.

Without TRIM, the SSD controller does not know when a page can be erased. The only indication that the controller has is when it writes a modified block to a clean block from the block pool. It then knows that the “old” block has pages that can be erased. In essence, TRIM is giving “hints” to the controller about the status of the data that it can use to improve performance and longevity.

Essentially, all SSD's have a finite number of writes in them before the performance becomes degraded to the point that a replacement is warranted. Especially SSD's that are nearly full of data. Trim DOES improve longevity. It's embarrassing that I'm even having to explain this.


RE: What?
By Reclaimer77 on 11/13/2010 4:53:42 PM , Rating: 1
And you know, this is silly. Arguing the benefits of TRIM is like arguing about fuel injection vs carburetor. Sure there are some hot-rod cavemen out there that will swear up and down carburetor's are just as good, but at the end of the day, we know better.


RE: What?
By jive on 11/15/2010 7:41:51 AM , Rating: 2
I thought TRIM is a command available in SSD controller command API. The actual implementation is up to the controller firmware to decide. I have always wondered what people think they are talking about when they talk about TRIM support or lack of it. My gut feeling is that they either don't agree what they are talking about or don't really know.


RE: What?
By melgross on 11/13/2010 12:57:24 PM , Rating: 2
Ok then, so what is TRIM doing that garbage collection isn't?


RE: What?
By jonup on 11/12/2010 11:04:31 PM , Rating: 2
You make no sense. What does RAIDing has to do with SATA3. Because individual drives are maxed out by SATA2 you RAID (0) them to get multitude of 3Gb/s to go beyound the limitation of the interface. So RAIDing makes a lot of sense if you need high sequential speeds. It is not despite the lack of 6Gb/s on your motherbord but because of the lack of SATA3 that you might want to RAID them. Anyways, your statement contradict itself.
As far as the lack of TRIM, I have been using G1 for over a year. I have performed one secure erase, and have kept 10-30GB of free space over this time period. I can run 45-50MB/s random 4K writes day in and day out. I run an occasional AS Cleaner (maybe once or twice a month). Going back to RAIDing, Intel SSDs would probably benefit the most from RAID 0 array, because of their low sequential writes. I only get 75MB/s. RAIDing four of them would allow me to get 300MB/s which btw is above the practical maximun of SATA2.


RE: What?
By rudy on 11/12/10, Rating: 0
Yaawwnnnnn.......
By ranger203 on 11/12/2010 5:34:32 PM , Rating: 2
Someone wake me up when SSDs are $1/GB. Then I'm ready to buy. Faster is great, but where are the cheapers...... I want my 80GB for $80. what the hell am i gonna do with a 40GB SSD?




RE: Yaawwnnnnn.......
By damianrobertjones on 11/12/2010 6:17:54 PM , Rating: 2
Stick your system drive on it and your data on the other drive


RE: Yaawwnnnnn.......
By Makaveli on 11/12/2010 6:44:56 PM , Rating: 2
You are going to be sleeping for many years and missing the boat!


RE: Yaawwnnnnn.......
By sdsdv10 on 11/12/2010 7:27:52 PM , Rating: 2
We're not that far off. The price comparison table from this article shows some units at $1.68/GB.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4010/kingston-ssdnow...


RE: Yaawwnnnnn.......
By walk2k on 11/12/2010 9:57:14 PM , Rating: 1
I put a Corsair F40 in my new PC, it was only $110 or so, not too bad. I already had a 1TB magnetic drive that I was booting from so have plenty of space and the F40 was a HUGE increase in boot/etc Windows speed. WELL worth the $$.

It is a little small, I would probably get a 80-100GB if I had to do it again, (but then you are talking almost double the monedy...) It does comfortably hold Windows 7 and all my programs, with 10GB to spare even. It boots in under 20 seconds cold, and resumes from standby in about 5 seconds (I can still hear the 1TB spinning up..)


price drop is not enough
By Makaveli on 11/12/2010 6:51:15 PM , Rating: 2
Intel needs to reduces prices more.

In Decemeber 2009 I paid $450 for the 160GB G2 drive and a year later its going for $439 and now dropping to $415?

I can get the 80GB G2 for $199 right now so there is no price drop there.

These are Canadian prices btw.




RE: price drop is not enough
By DanNeely on 11/12/2010 8:05:12 PM , Rating: 2
Until 22nm flash enters volume production prices aren't going to drop much. Supply of flash has been bottlenecked for over a year due to the flash makers not having started to built enough 34nm capacity to meet demand several years ago. The lead time for new 34nm fab is long enough that starting more when they realzied the problem would be pointless because they wouldn't be able to come online before 22nm took off.

Hopefully they did a better job of market forcasting when deciding how many 22nm flash fabs to built and supply will be sufficient to meet demand and let prices drop significantly.


RE: price drop is not enough
By JKflipflop98 on 11/16/2010 4:07:06 PM , Rating: 2
22nm flash production is cranking away as we speak. Hell, 22nm logic production is about to start. Exciting times indeed.


Stop complaining, already !!!!
By Boushh on 11/13/2010 7:11:00 PM , Rating: 2
I've upgraded my PC many times for the past 10 years with faster motherboards, memory, CPU's, GFX cards, HD drives, etc. etc.. But non of these upgrades ever gave me the same speed upgrade when I changed to SSD.

It's super fast, it's silent and once you have been using one, you never want to go back.

Sure they are expensive compared to the normal harddrives, but your system feels so much more snappy. Programs start directly and you no longer have to wait untill the swapping is over.

Size ? Where you are going with a SSD, you don't need size. Store your photo's and films on normal harddrives, they don't need the speed.

So stop buying all those other upgrades that give what ? An 5% increase in CPU speed, 5 more frames a second ? And buy an upgrade that gives you the feeling you finaly are getting somewhere.

Or are you all forgetting it's the harddrives that holds back you entire system !!!




By DanaGoyette on 11/14/2010 12:57:50 PM , Rating: 2
I bought a 120GB Vertex (Indilinx, not Sandforce) for like $300, and then it went on "shell-shocker" a week later for $220. And yet, even at 300 bucks, it was well worth it.

Anyway, the SSD is the single most amazing upgrade I've ever done for my computer. It makes disk operations so fast, many things become limited by my 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo CPU.

Handy hint: open resource monitor (resmon) in Vista or Win7... if disk activity (% active time) is high and CPU usage is not 100%, then your HDD is the bottleneck. With my SSD, I mostly see CPU hit 100% usage before the HDD hits 100% active.

Windows updates? Now they take like 30 seconds, instead of minutes. Running on battery? No longer have to wait for HDD to spin up (3/4 second) from spun-down state.

I keep the music I use most on my SSD, and my videos and less-frequently-used music, as well as Steam, on the HDD (in CD drive bay now). Any time I'd be playing a Steam game is a time I don't particularly care about power usage. 120GB has been enough for both Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and much of my documents and music.

Funny note: it takes iTunes (on SSD) the same amount of time (10 seconds) as it takes Ubuntu to completely boot from Grub. In fact, because the SSD is so fast, Ubuntu originally failed to boot -- it tried to mount the partition by label before udev had even finished figuring out the partition label! Thankfully, recent updates have fixed this. Now, if I boot with external hard drive connected, the 1-2 seconds that takes to spin up during boot is significant.

I also want an SSD for my netbook, but since Samsung doesn't give AHCI mode, there's no chance of TRIM. I'd rather wait for AMD's cool stuff next year...


Still too small...
By Nemeth782 on 11/13/2010 6:00:10 PM , Rating: 2
I want an SSD, I really do...

But it seems that it's a max of 256GB or so, without compromising performance (the 480GB drives are either slower, or internally RAIDed meaning no TRIM, and universally expensive)

I get that you can use it as a boot drive, but I want to install my apps to it.... mostly my Steam folder but this is ~500GB, and short of selectively allocating games to the SSD by mounting drives as folders etc, there is no way to split it.

Here's hoping the next gen of drives (SF-2500, Intel G3) offer larger capacities at sensible price points. (as in, a 480GB drive should cost at most 2x a 240GB drive)




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