 Probably the best SSD in the world... |
| Review Date: January 20, 2010 |
| Reviewer: T. D. Welsh, Basingstoke, Hampshire UK |
After some careful comparison shopping, I bought this solid-state disk just after New Year 2010. It took just half an hour to fit it to my PC, and another hour or so to do a clean install of 64-bit Windows 7 onto it. Within 24 hours I was up and running again with all my applications and data (although my data files are stored on a couple of conventional Velociraptor HDDs, so they didn't need to be restored). Admittedly, I fitted the X25-M as a replacement for the OCZ Solid SSD with which PCspecialist shipped my computer last year, but it would have made no difference if I had been replacing a conventional hard drive or simply adding the X25-M as an extra drive. Although it has a 2.5 inch form factor (and I was surprised by how small it looked when I had unpacked it - about the size of a state-of-the-art mobile phone), Intel thoughtfully includes a metal bracket and lots of screws in case you need to install it in a 3.5 inch slot (normal for desktop PCs). The 2.5 inch form factor is ready to fit right into a laptop or notebook, however - where its low power consumption and robustness are ideal.
Be sure to get a 34nm (nanometre) model, not last year's 50nm types which - while good - are not as fast (although, until end-of-life discounted, they may actually cost more). It's well worth nailing down the Intel part number of the specific drive you plan to order - in this case it's SSDSA2MH080G2R5 - and checking it on Intel's own Web site to make sure you are getting exactly what you want. There's no need to worry about the SATA-300 label, although that's really just pure marketing (technically there is no such thing). All you need to remember is that SATA drives from reputable manufacturers are backward compatible, so if you already have any kind of SATA disks, the X25-M will work with the same controller and cables.
One of the first things I did was to download Intel's latest firmware update and the Intel SSD Toolbox - a link to which is helpfully provided in the accompanying installation booklet. The firmware comes in the shape of an ISO image, ready to burn to CD-R with whatever software you have (Windows 7 has this built in). You then reboot, having arranged to boot from the CD, which runs the firmware update under DOS. That done, you can restart the system and try out the Intel SSD Toolbox, which lets you print out a mass of detailed information about the drive - far more than you want to know, unless you need to fix a fault - run quick or in-depth tests, do a SMART health check, or schedule the Intel SSD Optimizer software to run (once a week is recommended). The Optimizer is necessary to keep getting the best out of your SSD, as it rearranges the disk space to compensate for any blocks that become unusable through repeated writing. You can think of it as the equivalent of defragmentation, which should never be done on an SSD.
When I first received my PC last year, it performed atrociously - which disappointed me, as I had specified a fast machine with an Intel Core i7 and 6GB of fast RAM. However, it often paused or even hung, and occasionally crashed - not at all what I had hoped for. It turned out this was due to a combination of two serious problems: Windows Vista and the OCZ Solid SSD I was using as partition C:. Vista is notorious for poor user responsiveness, and doesn't handle SSDs all that well either; while the OCZ Solid was a "budget" SSD whose controller got a name for "stuttering" especially when writing to disk. When I upgraded to Windows 7 even the OCZ Solid started to work better, but my Windows Performance Index remained at 5.9 - that being the rating the OCZ Solid got. After fitting the Intel X25-M I ran the Windows Performance Index again and this time the SSD rating was a more satisfactory 7.4.
Probably the main differences you will notice, if you replace a conventional HDD with the X25-M as system disk, will be faster booting and shutdown, and faster process activation. Applications that used to take a while to get out of bed and get dressed seem to leap onto the screen - which gives you a nice feel of responsiveness. The key is that the SSD doesn't have any mechanical latency - no rotational delay, no heads to move in and out - so all operations take more or less the same time. That's why there is no point running a defragmenter - indeed, that's a bad idea as it can worsen performance.
You can't really justify the cost of an SSD like the X25-M on the grounds of the performance improvement you get, unless the disk is doing a great deal of read-intensive work. On a personal desktop PC, it's just a really "nice to have" cherry on the top, that makes your machine that much more responsive. On a laptop, of course, there is the consideration that if you carry it around and happen to drop it, your data is safe - unlike a conventional HDD which might be damaged by mechanical impact. And the lower power consumption is useful, too. |
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