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...
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Alleniv - Wednesday, August 19, 2009 - link
Hi all,I report this new review about X25-M, that takes in consideration a comparative with other SSDs and also with HDDs, with several benchmarks ? http://www.informaticaeasy.net/le-mi...m-da-80gb.h...">http://www.informaticaeasy.net/le-mi...m-da-80gb.h...
Bytales - Saturday, January 3, 2009 - link
You said this: For example, let's say you download a 2MB file to your band new, never been used SSD, which gets saved to blocks 10, 11, 12 and 13. You realize you downloaded the wrong file and delete it, then go off to download the right file. Rather than write the new file to blocks 10, 11, 12 and 13, the flash controller will write to blocks 14, 15, 16 and 17. In fact, those four blocks won't get used again until every other block on the drive has been written to onceBy this i understand that a bigger capacity SSD, for instance 320 vs 160 will have more blocks and hence you will need more writes to deplete the number a write cycles the SSD was designed for. So for SSD bigger means even longer lasting. IS this TRUE ?
lpaster - Wednesday, November 26, 2008 - link
Can you overclock this SSD?Sendou - Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - link
There are optimization methods available for SSD's which can mitigate performance loss through genuine usage over time.One such is Diskeeper's HyperFast Technology.
There is a white paper regarding HyperFast available at:
http://downloads.diskeeper.com/pdf/Optimizing-Soli...
BludBaut - Thursday, March 31, 2011 - link
I read the pdf article you linked from Diskeeper.Based on the information Anand has given in his articles about Intel's technology, Diskeeper's "whitepaper" sounds like crap advertising by a company who's afraid their technology might be considered not only useless but detrimental to use with SSDs. I'm inclined to agree since Diskeeper's own results show a 4x write loss by just *one* "optimization" while Anand's article clearly suggests that the proper design (which he says Intel has accomplished) eliminates the need for Diskeeper's service.
Until I find more thorough examination of the facts, Diskeeper's remarks make me distrust them.
On the other hand, Anand's article definitely sounds not just like a puff piece for Intel, but qualifies in my mind as advertising. Wonder how much money Intel has spent on Anandtech? That's not to suggest that anything is misrepresentative (well, it wasn't meant to sound that way, but keep reading and you'll find the one-sided praise will later be partially retracted and I don't know the end of the story yet), but we all know that advertising always leaves out the negatives.
(Reviews shouldn't sound like advertisements but anyone who's been reading magazine reviews for 30 years knows that's frequently the case. The reviewer's bills get paid by the manufacturers' of the products he's reviewing. But, the reviewer is objective of course. It's a matter of journalistic integrity. Yeah, I believe that. Don't you?)
One such negative was the promotion of the life of the drive. "20GB a day for five years"? Anand praises Intel for multiplying that by five to "100GB a day for five years" but then tells us that they'll only guarantee the drive for three years and has the audacity to suggest we'll likely have a recourse "if we can prove" ... -- how is anyone going to prove how many GBs a day they put on their computer? The annoyance of trying to keep track is not something 99% of people would do.
Did you do the math to see how long it takes to write 100GB to a drive with a write speed of 200MB/s? Eight minutes and twenty seconds is all it takes.
Well, that's great if all you use your computer for is reading articles, checking the news and sales prices and sending email. The drive should last as long as your computer. But if you love video (who loves video???), it's a different story entirely.
There's another negative that, though first denied, eventually was acknowledged. More than six months later, Anand reports back and says essentially, 'Intel is still the best but the performance does degrade with time and I don't know why.' If he's explained it since then, I've yet to read it.
So, for those just reading the article, don't get so encouraged that you start drooling. The article has a tendency to make one think, "What am I waiting for? I want one of these puppies!" Unfortunately, Intel's technology isn't as rosy and bulletproof and Anand made it sound.
kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
I hope you do some benchmark on Samsung's new 256GB SSD. Hopefully it's as good as Intel's.kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
its read/write speed is 200/160 mb/s. Will it sustain that speed in a multi applications running environment??kevonly - Friday, November 21, 2008 - link
sorryread/write speed is 220/200 mb/s.
scotopicvision - Monday, November 10, 2008 - link
The article was an amazing read, fantastic, and well done thank you.D111 - Saturday, October 25, 2008 - link
Legacy OS like Windows Vista, XP, and Applications like Microsoft Office 2003, 2007, etc. have built in, inherent flaws with regard to SSDs.
Specifically, optimizations of these OS for mechanical hard drives like superfetch, prefetch, etc. tend to slow down, rather than help performance and is unnecessary to speed up reads in an SSD, but slow it down with unnecessary writes of small files, which SSDs are slower than a regular hard drive.
Things like automatic drive defragmentation with Vista does nothing for SSDs except to slow them down.
Properly optimized, even low cost 2007 generation SSDs test out as equivalent to a 7200 rpm consumer grade drive, and typical SSDs made in 2008 or later tend to outperform mechanical hard drives.
The tests done here have done nothing to "tweak" the OS to remove design hindrances to SSD performance, and thus, have no validity or technical merit.
The test, as presented, would be similar to installing a 19th century steam engine on a sailing ship, and observing that it is rather slow ---- without mentioning the drag and performance hits caused by the unused sail rigging, masts, etc.
See the discussion here for a detailed discussion of SSD performance tweaks and what it takes to make them perform well with legacy OS and Applications.
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/forumdispl...">http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum...display....