The price on the X25-M are already $200 less than the article states.

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.

What your test demonstrate is that SSDs outperform Hard Drives IN SPITE OF the deliberate slowdowns done by the OS.

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...display.php?s=&daysprune=...

I find the difference between Intels official values for power consumption (0.15 W max!!) and TR's values really confusing. Did you measure power consumption with this "DIPM" feature or without? ( http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/index.htm )

Damage, you should test out the Fusion-IO's ioDrive.

http://www.fusionio.com/Products.aspx

Intel has one nice SSD drive, but it is still only useful for servers and workstations.

Mainstream 7200RPM HDDs still do the job for general users and enthusiast for less $$$$$.

BTW, game load time is mostly I/O random seek time and CPU-bounded.

Thanks very much for the review, was anxiously awaiting.

Could you give us some idea of real world usage, subjectively? Does the system 'feel' faster/snappier? I have heard rumblings of hitching or few second lock ups with other SSD drives, does Intel's offering suffer any of that?

Good review.

I'll buy one when the price drops by 80%, the size is 10x is big, and the write performance is the same as the read performance. The uber-drive. Then since they use little power and (thus) make little heat, I'll get like 10 of them and have a massive RAID10 or something.

mmmmmmm... SSD RAID

It seems to me that unless your usage of this drive is very read intensive, then overall performance is pretty poor. Until there is less of a yawning gap between read and write performance, it's really not worth the money imho.

My rule still stands.
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15433/6

When SSD's beat magnetic drives in _every_ single benchmark and 'only' have a 50% premium in price, I will snap up a reasonable OS sized drive to use.

Until then, not buying.
I'm sure the results on page 6 aren't common but I do tend to thrash disks more than most users, the last thing I need is the machine slower than it was previously :/

While it's great to see these solid-state drive in action it will be at least 4 years before I would use one in my main laptop. I still don't trust them and the price is sooo high per GB that it makes more sense to go with a 7200rpm, yeah you loss on the battery but this isn't an issue for me.

On the negative side, you had to use an old ICH7R in your test rig because newer Intel southbridges are completely b0rked when it comes to SSD compatibility and performance. Hot Hardware had to use NVIDIA's nForce 790i SLI Ultra chipset for their own review. Since we're talking about the biggest core-logic provider in the world, I think that's a little sad.

Semirelated, but does everyone else hate the new Intel website? grrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

After I read the part about disk longevity I was confused. How long would this thing last?

These are disks you will never want or need to de-fragment. With seek times that fast, and the risk of wear, why would you bother?

Aside from that, these still make an excellent option for backup servers and even web servers.

For a home user, the price premium vs. performance is still not worth it. 10 seconds of lost time in total every day would have a tough time coming up with the cost difference between 1TB of HD and 1TB of SSD.

-LS

Damage, NCQ is limited to a queue size of 32 by protocol design. The NCQ controller has to allow a queue size of up to 32 to be compliant. In fact its limited to 31 because of a design flaw. I bet Intel would have made a larger queue size if it could. This also shows that current i/o busses don't take flash storage into account. Expect a larger queue size and other flash based storage optimizations in newer versions of sata.

from http://linux-ata.org/faq.html#ncq

"Both the host controller and device constrain the number of NCQ commands that can be outstanding. The SATA specification maximum is 32 tags. Most devices support 32 tags, but the standard permits devices to support less. Similarly, most host controllers support 32 tags.

However, the ATA standard has a design flaw. The NCQ tag is presumed to be a 32-bit bitmap (32-bit dword). If all 32 tags are asserted, this produces a value (0xffffffff) that is the same value returned by reading a hardware register after the hardware has been hot-unplugged, or suffers a major failure. Thus, to distinguish this condition, libata artificially limits all NCQ configurations to 31 tags rather than 32"

MLC drives = *yawn*
At current prices, I can only see these being attractive for ruggedness. I mean, the write performance isn't always, or even usually, going to hinder performance that much, but the cost per GB? Ick. 80GB ? Windows 7 probably won't even install on that </tongue in cheek>

You mentioned the drive isn't as expensive as competing SLC drives. But you forgot to mention you have to pay rougly double the price of competing MLC drives.

Can we get some Bigfoot sized SDDs now? Or maybe 3.5" double height? I would love to see a 2 TB+ capacity. Then again I was declared insane just last week. Oh well.

Nice review. I'd really like to see it compared to 15k RPM SAS drives (both 3.5" and 2.5"). Maybe not as important for the consumer class drives, but definitely for the enterprise drives that'll debut later. Still, it'd be interesting to put these in perspective with SAS.

I guess Samsung are going to have to work on their SSD controllers a little! Good review, a new baseline has been drawn. Let's see where things go from here.

I love that this technology is improving with every generation but it hasn't proven itself to the consumer yet. 2-5 years and perhaps a couple SSD generations later I would be much more comfortable adopting the technology and using it for day to day use. Bugs need to be worked out, life expectancy needs to improve and general write performance needs to increase.

The CPU utilization graphs would be much more useful if they showed CPU/MB/sec or CPU/IO/sec instead of just CPU. Can't easily tell if a drive is more CPU efficient then another or not with the current graphs.

why didnt they ship you 2, so we could see the raid scaling?

Awesome review ! I've been waiting for this ever since Intel mentioned it for the first time. This drive has a LOT of potential especially if Intel switches production to 32 nano.

Any info on when will the 1.8" form factor drives be out ?

Adi

Something I've been wondering, but haven't had an opportunity to test, is how much impact filesystem metadata updates have on SSDs where write performance can be the gating factor. Specifically, or at least most acutely, the fact that Windows by default updates the LastAccessDate whenever a file is read means that you get writes even in a read-only test. This is controlled by the
NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate
regkey in SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem

Most of the time it's not going to make any difference (particularly on a drive that does a good job of handling concurrent IO), but I wonder if it would show up in some of the more intensive tests involving large numbers of files.

Nice review.

There's something I've been wondering for a whlie with the storage tests though. At this point the storage testbed is just a bit dated. I understand the usefulness of using results for previous drive tests but at what point do you decide to update the storage testing platform?