Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2008 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Power Consumption & Battery Life
Intel lists the idle power consumption of the X25-M at 0.06W and the "typical workload" power consumption as 150mW. This is far lower than any conventional hard drive and relatively comparable to other SSDs.
In a desktop system using the Intel X25-M will shave off around 3 - 5W of total system power at the outlet under idle or load conditions. The savings are less compared to a 2.5" drive, but the real question there is how much more battery life do you get if you switch to the X25-M?
We didn't have enough time to run through a full suite of battery life tests but using MobileMark 2007's Productivity test I looked at the Intel X25-M, the OCZ Core (JMicron based MLC), the OCZ SLC SSD (Samsung based SLC) and the Seagate Momentus 7200.2.
Overall performance was highest on the OCZ SLC SSD, but only marginally compared to the Intel X25-M. The OCZ Core managed to come in third place, still faster than the mechanical disk.
The battery life of the system was actually lower with the OCZ Core, presumably thanks to the strange write performance issues. But generally the SLC, MLC and HDD all last around the same amount of time. Intel's X25-M boosted battery life by a bit over 6% or 27 minutes, not an insignificant increase in battery life.
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aeternitas - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
Wow.#1 Meaning; Great read.
#2 Meaning; Why do you not use World of Warcraft in your testings more? This game still has huge system requirements on absolute full settings in crouded areas. No one is getting 60fps in that game in Shatt on a saterday night 16xAA/AF full distance view. Everything maxed running a high resolution. Also, the disk access of this game may not be as much as Crysis, but its far FAR more prolonged as people play this game for a matter of years, instead of a handfull of months tops.
hoohoo - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - link
What?! Google Chrome Launch Time? Is this a new benchmark? The world was waiting for that test I can tell ya! Did Google slip a little something in your pocket?Ph0b0s - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - link
Sorry if this repeats what anyone else has said, but I think this is the best harddisk review I have seen. All the other hdd reviews I have read though, all go into detail about how many mb/s the drive can transfer and what the access time is, I/O performance etc. This is all very nice, but all we really care about is how does the hdd perform in real world apps and games in comparision to other drives. How much faster is my browser going to load.And that is why I was so impressed with this review. I realise it probably took more time to create this review, but it was well worth it. You can see how much the drives in the comparision compare to the amount of money you will spend instead of having to extrapolate from throughput benchmarks.
I would feel a lot more confident in putting down money on the X25 after this review. Because I can see what the benefit I would get after in comparsion to other drives. Though the X25 needs to be another $100 dollars cheaper...
Anyway, please more hdd reviews like this...
bruto - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - link
Anand, could you please post map load times for R6 Vegas 2 usingthese drives?
That game was killing me, and I'd like to know just how much
happiness is around the corner :)
FFFFFF - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
I am very familiar with the tech works of SSDs and it is interesting to know of the security risk that involves the technology. http://www.techworld.com/SECURITY/NEWS/index.cfm?n...">http://www.techworld.com/SECURITY/NEWS/...cfm?news...This is one reason why I am not going to upgrade to SSD just yet till they figure out a more secure encryption.
cokelight - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
RE: PLEASE LEARN HOW TO USE COMMAS! by ggordonliddy, 19 hours agoYou are just making it clear that you do not have a firm grasp of English. You are afraid of those who criticize poor grammar, because you know that you yourself will be exposed for the fraudulent pustule that lies beneath your slimy veneer.
I have a life. I'm just sick of illiterate authors. Just because it is a tech site is no excuse for extremely poor writing skills. I'm talking about skills that should be completely mastered before being allowed to graduate from elementary school.
^
Take your elitism elsewhere. If you actually practiced what you preached then you'd note your own comma abuse:
"You are afraid of those who criticize poor grammar, because you know that you yourself will be exposed for the fraudulent pustule that lies beneath your slimy veneer."
The second clause is dependent. Therefore, it does not necessitate a comma.
aeternitas - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
Use the reply link.xenon83 - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
"Do keep in mind though, the numbers we're talking about here are ridiculously low - even 900 µs to write to MLC flash is much faster than writing to a mechanical hard disk."But when it comes to random writes ssd's in general - this intel ssd included - fails miserably.
http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106">http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106
johncl - Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - link
Yes as the other poster say, the Intel drive have solved the issues with small random writes that the OZC and other MLC drives so far have been suffering from. If you read the whole article thoroughly you will see that clearly.Lets hope OCZ can come up with a better controller in their next generation MLC SSDs. We really need the competition here to bring those prices down, the Intel drive is a tad too expensive atm imo.
balotz - Tuesday, September 9, 2008 - link
Random writes are exactly as fast as sequential writes on this Intel SSD (10,000 random 4k writes per second).The article you referenced uses data from an SSD which appears to suffer from issues relating to the JMicron controller.
The Intel SSD is obviously not affected, this is clearly shown by the numbers in this very review!