X-25 M. a real review from a real person

*summary at bottom*

i've never liked benchmarks. they only really indicate relative differences between whatever they're compared to. the best benchmarking tool is a stopwatch, which is what i used with my fancy new hard drive.

I'm just going to brag here for a minute. I really love days like today. I found some GREAT floorstanders with an amp included on CL and got those today. A new case, another 1.5tb drive and my new drive. oh my 3008wfp comes in today too. early birthday presents i guess?

so whatever, this is my second ssd. first was a core which sucked. this got good reviews so i used it.

to compare boot times i went from the moment i powered the system on until i saw the taskbar. the reason for this is to minimize discrepancies between the raptor(150 window drive) and the ssd since the raptor had lots of programs and the ssd would only have a few.

my system specs are

some asus mobo
q9300 @ 2.94
6gb ram
all testing was done with several other hdd times. this added 2 seconds to both boot times.

the ssd did it in 54 seconds. 13 of those seconds were before the pc started loading windows. I guess "really" it took 41 seconds then.

the ssd did it in 47 seconds. I know, not that amazing right? If you take off those 13 seconds again it comes down to 34. That's a ~16% increase which is pretty respectable.

Boot time? lol.

put the windows disc in the pc, set bios to boot off cd, turn machine off.

from power on until i was able to browse the internet was 15 minutes 58 seconds. Boom!


Photoshop? Photoshop used to take 6-7 seconds to load and would be a little slow until it was done.

I timed it, it's just under two seconds and there's no lag. That splash screen is a blink of an eye. and that was the very first time loading it. so no superfetch or anything.

everything else? instant

firefox - click the button, opened, just as fast as going from C to program files. 0.0000 seconds delay. your mouse cant move fast enough anymore.

imgburn is like 1/10th of a second. the splash screen blinks and the program loads.

alt-tabbing out of games. sadly i did not really time this prior to using the ssd. but i can tell you how fast it is on the ssd. i know for a fact a big benefit comes from going from 4 to 6gb of ram.

current times are: alt-tab out of css. its almost instant but not quite. again I'd probably say 1/8th of a second, but it feels faster than loading imgburn or something. probably because more stuff is happening visually.

going from desktop back to game is just a hair under 3 seconds


loading my database software and importing the files went from 120 files/second to 440.AND IT DIDNT MAKE A SINGLE ****ING NOISE THE WHOLE TIME.

i dont know if you've ever been around a raptor for more than an hour but doing hd intensive stuff is just CCCCCCRRRRRRRRUNCHHHH forever.


cyberlink and mounting blu-ray images. this is still not super-fast. im guessing since the images are on 7200rpm drives this is more a function of that

itunes. itunes still takes about 1.5 seconds to load. not really sure why. kind of ****es me off but whatever.


honestly this is worth the $380 just to not hear anything. the fact that it kicks the **** out of anything you throw at it is just a very, very sweet bonus.

zero stuttering whatsoever and i tested the hell out of it by installing windows update, two programs, and importing my itunes library all at the same time while listening to some music in WMP.













Cliff notes:

this drive is ****ing awesome. buy one immediately. this and the 30" monitor are easily the two biggest steps in PC industry in the last 5 years.

this drive is ****ing awesome. buy one immediately.

Click to expand...

Agree, loving mine. Right now I'm running Vista Ultimate 64 but with 1GB of RAM since the 4GB I bought needs to be RMAd, but it sure doesn't feel like I'm only on 1GB thanks to the X25-M. Still multitasking and using Adobe CS3, Office Suite, Quickbooks, etc. with lots of speed.

There have been reports of people experiencing the Intel SSD death crawl though, something to keep in mind: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=208242&page=366

As I said over at NBR, I hope Intel releases their defrag utility soon so that this won't be a big deal.

after the 4-5 fx addons including aero theme fx now takes about .5 seconds to load. still faster than before.

strangely if i have a fx browser open and open another one it opens instantly.

tom10167 said:

after the 4-5 fx addons including aero theme fx now takes about .5 seconds to load. still faster than before.

strangely if i have a fx browser open and open another one it opens instantly.

Click to expand...

Because the program does not have to load itself from the disk, it just creates another window. The majority of the process occurs in RAM.

Ashura said:

Agree, loving mine. Right now I'm running Vista Ultimate 64 but with 1GB of RAM since the 4GB I bought needs to be RMAd, but it sure doesn't feel like I'm only on 1GB thanks to the X25-M. Still multitasking and using Adobe CS3, Office Suite, Quickbooks, etc. with lots of speed.

There have been reports of people experiencing the Intel SSD death crawl though, something to keep in mind: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=208242&page=366

As I said over at NBR, I hope Intel releases their defrag utility soon so that this won't be a big deal.

Click to expand...

Intel is going to have to come out with a fix sooner than later. The issue is far to widespread to be any kind of coincidence. The phenomon doesn't seem to be isolated to Intel but does seem to hurt it a bit more than the others. It seems the wear leveling is fragmenting the crap out of the drives but you can't defragment them, quite the catch 22.

coudl you run the atto benchmark... i kno u dont like benchmarks but atto does a good job of measuring read and write speeds.

http://www.techpowerup.com/downloads/1137/ATTO_Disk_Benchmark_v2.34.html

No installation, no problem.



Left everything how it was since I have no idea wtf that stuff means.

Are my writes low?

ou_phidelt said:

Intel is going to have to come out with a fix sooner than later. The issue is far to widespread to be any kind of coincidence. The phenomon doesn't seem to be isolated to Intel but does seem to hurt it a bit more than the others. It seems the wear leveling is fragmenting the crap out of the drives but you can't defragment them, quite the catch 22.

Click to expand...

I don't see what fragmentation has to do with it... with <.1ms seek times, even with one hundred fragments, your access is still faster than a file in a grand total of two fragments (if you can even call that fragmented) on a non-SSD 10ms drive.

petteyg359 said:

I don't see what fragmentation has to do with it... with <.1ms seek times, even with one hundred fragments, your access is still faster than a file in a grand total of two fragments (if you can even call that fragmented) on a non-SSD 10ms drive.

Click to expand...

Here is what can happen. Is that the kind of performance you want from your $350+ SSD?

Take a few minutes and have a read. It's a very good article and will make you think.

tom10167 said:

so no superfetch or anything.

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And I hope your superfetch and prefetch is turned off?

I like your real world testing, I think that is the best way to test,however some of your test's are ram utilization.

Easy way to tell is look at your hard drive light on your case when your testing.

ya im way too lazy to play that ish in.

tom10167 said:

No installation, no problem.

Left everything how it was since I have no idea wtf that stuff means.

Are my writes low?

Click to expand...

typical of cheaper ssds.... slow writes compared to read speeds. and random write speeds r horid too... thats the one downfall of ssds ATM... once they get that figured and make it cheap then WOOT WOOT.

Where might I feel that so I can see how it feels vs. the Raptor?

My opinion on SSD's is still that you require a hardware raid card to get thier power out of them. It makes them too expensive. When they release some with enough buffer to realize thier speed I'll be right there with you with a few in raid 0.

Dude paragraphs would help people in this thread.

ou_phidelt said:

Here is what can happen. Is that the kind of performance you want from your $350+ SSD?

Take a few minutes and have a read. It's a very good article and will make you think.

Click to expand...

That is indeed a great article.

My $0.02: the 'fragmentation' seen in the intel SSD is a result of the firmware -write combining/leveling/whatever- manipulating the data at the physical block level. It is independent of filesystem fragmentation, which is what affects normal HDDs. File fragmentation has hardly any effect on SSDs, instead it's free space fragmentation (again, filesystem level) that is another factor in poor random write performance after prolonged usage.

So internal and file system fragmentation are more or less independent of each other. The free space frag problem can be fixed with Hyperfast for most drives, but clearly not for the Intel, since it's root cause is different.
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?p=4351675
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/archives/2008/12/hyperfast_is_al.html (see the last comment with benchmarks)

soundbarrier said:

That is indeed a great article.

My $0.02: the 'fragmentation' seen in the intel SSD is a result of the firmware -write combining/leveling/whatever- manipulating the data at the physical block level. It is independent of filesystem fragmentation, which is what affects normal HDDs. File fragmentation has hardly any effect on SSDs, instead it's free space fragmentation (again, filesystem level) that is another factor in poor random write performance after prolonged usage.

So internal and file system fragmentation are more or less independent of each other. The free space frag problem can be fixed with Hyperfast for most drives, but clearly not for the Intel, since it's root cause is different.
http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?p=4351675
http://www.diskeeperblog.com/archives/2008/12/hyperfast_is_al.html (see the last comment with benchmarks)

Click to expand...

Sounds to complicated for me I just like to turn my pc on and read about other peoples problems so I own a PC that does the work for me, no maintenance or fiddling required thank you.