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
Overall System Performance with SYSMark 2007
Our first test is the full SYSMark 2007 benchmark suite. It's a system-level performance test that measures performance based on average response time, making it a great candidate for our SSDs, which should provide pretty low response times, at least compared to standard mechanical disks.
The Intel X25-M does very well here, just edging past the fastest desktop drive on the market and outperforming all other mechanical disks in its own 2.5" form factor. We saw a 15% increase in overall performance under SYSMark compared to the Seagate Momentus 7200.2; to get that sort of speed boost on a notebook would take Nehalem otherwise.
You'll notice that I threw in the 150GB Raptor in the mix as well, that's our current CPU testbed HDD. Our Q9450 saw performance go up by 9% thanks to the X25-M, that's more of a performance boost than you'd get by upgrading to a QX9650 and again, this is a system-level test, not disk specific.
Here you also see the problems with the JMicron equipped MLC drives, the Intel X25-M manages to outperform these drives by nearly 30%. The Video Creation test is particularly bad with the Intel X25-M garnering a score nearly 2x of the JMicron MLC drives. We've already established that the X25-M is the only MLC drive that you should consider, this simply helps provide more support.
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npp - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
I first sought the review of the drive on techreport today, and it was jawdropping - 230 Mb/s sustained read, 70 Mb/s write, 0,08 s access time... And all those unbelievable IOPS figures in the iometer test. The review here confirms all I've read, and it's amazing. Now I can see why SATA 3 is on the way - saturating a SATA 2 channel may become a real issue soon.The only field where the drive "fails" is write performance - and now I can imagine what the SLC version will be able to deliver. I guess it will be the fastest single drive around.
I really liked the comment about Nehalem - sure, one of those SSD beasts will make much more of a difference compared to a $1k Bloomfield. Nice!
vijay333 - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
lots of good info...thanks.in for one as soon as they bump up capacity and reduce price...not asking for much i think :)
wien - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
Excellent review, and a good read throughout. I especially enjoyed the way you guided us through your thought-process when looking into the latency issue. I love fiddling around trying to figure stuff out, so that part made me envious of your job. :)darckhart - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
i don't know the technical differences, but i've run into so many problems with the jmicron controllers on the recent motherboards these days that i can't understand why anyone would choose to use jmicron for *any* of their products. surely the cost isn't *that* much lower than the competition?leexgx - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
i thought there an problem with SSD + intel chip sets makeing poor performace wish SSD,as an intel chip set was used have you tryed doing some tests on an nvidia board or AMD
Gary Key - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
There was until the March 2008 driver updates from Intel. Performance is basically on-par between the three platforms now with Standard IDE and AHCI configurations, still testing RAID.michal1980 - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
IMHO, the price drop will be even more brutal then you think.in a year, prices should be, 1/2 and capacity double. so about 300 dollars for a 160gb. Flash memories growth rate right now is amazing.
leexgx - Thursday, January 22, 2009 - link
we need the review of the new V2http://www.dailytech.com/Exclusive+Interview+With+...">http://www.dailytech.com/Exclusive+Inte...on+on+SS...
ksherman - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
And then if they can keep that price, but double capacity again two years from now, a $300 320GB SSD would be exactly what I am looking forward to for my next laptop!Googer - Monday, September 8, 2008 - link
Today, you can pick up a 160GB HDD for $50 and a 320GB HDD for around $90-100. This make the 80GB SSD 20x more expensive than a HDD of the same size.