HARDOCP - Intel's New X25-M Solid State Drive - Video Review - Intel's New Solid State Drive

Date:: Thursday , September 25, 2008
Author:: Kyle Bennett
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Intel's New Solid State Drive - Video Review

A lot of smart people have said a lot of smart things about Intel's new 80GB Solid State Drive recently sampled to the media. But some of the basic questions I had on my mind were left unchecked, like, "Is it really faster, or is that just what HDTach tells you on a graph?" We get out the stop watch and a 5-disk RAID array and go to town.

Introduction

Solid State Drives, or SSDs, are nothing new. They have been around for a good while now and companies like OCZ have been selling them across many different models. But the fact of the matter is that the downsides have far outweighed the upsides, particularly when it comes to drive speed. Enter Intel. Intel is not known to lollygag when it comes to products and its R&D, and earlier this month Intel threw its own hat into the SSD ring. The Intel SSD we are looking at here today is the X25-M model.

As noted above, we were not fully satisfied with the reviews we had read covering the X25-M so we decided to apply our own brand of hard drive justice to the SSD and a few other traditional platter based hard drives. We purchased a stop watch and got out our 5-disk RAID0 array enclosure that would write at over 230MB/s and put it to work on our Intel X25-M and our comparison drives.