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
The Generic SSD
Intel isn't the first manufacturer to get into the SSD market, in fact quite a few of the companies we regularly deal with have SSDs. OCZ Technology, SuperTalent, Patriot, G.Skill, Mtron, and Silicon Power are just the names that contributed hardware for this review, but many more actually make SSDs.
Silicon Power drives provided by DV Nation
You'll notice that most of these companies are memory companies, not chip companies. Cracking open any of their SSDs reveals the true nature of their SSD manufacturing business: most of them simply rebrand someone else's SSD.
Let's take the MLC drives for example, here we have MLC drives from OCZ (the infamous Core), SuperTalent and Silicon Power:
Every last one of the drives has the exact same layout, same flash devices and same Jmicron controller (the JMF602).
The same is true for SLC designs, here we have SLC SSDs from G.Skill and OCZ:
They are the same, you could give them ice crea...nevermind
Note that these are the same drive, in this case purchased from Samsung and placed in new housing.
Only Mtron offers a slight amount of innovation by using its own FPGA as a controller:
But we know very little about any of these controllers so it's tough to say if Mtron's FPGA is done well.
For the most part however, all existing MLC drives on the market are built out of the same parts, as are all existing SLC drives. The MLC drives all use the JMF602 and the SLC drives use the Samsung S3C49RBX01 host controller with 32MB of on-board DRAM. The SLC drives are all priced above $640 for 64GB while the MLC drives are all under $300 for 64GB, Intel's 80GB MLC is priced in between the two (but closer to the SLC drives) at $595.
We'll soon see that Intel's price is justified in the market, but before doing that it's important to address an issue with these very tempting MLC drives...
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
96 Comments
View All Comments
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.