News Intel launches 120GB X25-M SSD

It is getting there, slowly. I just bought a OCZ Vertex 2E Bigfoot from an online retailer for £170. Really happy with it so far. Cheaper than the 120GB X25-M in the article and much faster write speeds.

 

Indeed, why get the intel drive with those specs when you can get this: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-060-OC&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1427 for £10 less but 40% faster speeds.

 

Two things - the first is installs. I don't want to wait 30 minutes for a game to install due to the write speed being slow. Yes, I realise that I don't do this on a daily basis, and I could just live with the slower speed of an install, but I choose not to - I want my PC to be fast, all the time.

The second is that the write speed can really impact the general speed of the PC. I had one of the first generation Intel SSDs without TRIM support. After about 8 months or so my system had become less responsive than with the old Raptor hard drive - it would lock and stutter horribly whenever there was intense disk writing. AS-SSD showed the write performance had dropped to 10 Mb/sec.

I got an OCZ Vertex 2 120Gb, and the system is much better since.

 

I own the 160GB G2 and the 100mb write speed cap is hardly an issue. As an OS drive i'm rarely writing to it on a regular basis 90% of the time you are reading from it. Hence the SSD+ large HD setup!

The sandforce drives performance drop when they come across data they cannot compress. And in actual use I couldn't tell the difference between the two of them.

And Intel drives are still #1 for reliability.

LMAO @ Taninver 30 mins to install a game because of the 100mb write cap Sure bud!

I call BS on that you are telling me your Raptor with like a 7-8ms access time was faster than your SSD which is at 0.1ms even if it doesn't support trim and performace was degraded there is no way the system should feel slower than a HD. I think you had other issues with your rig bud.

 

I don't appreciate your tone Makaveli, in fact that comes pretty close to flaming in my view. If you want to disagree with the points I make, fine, but you could do so a lot more politely.

First off - yes, 30 minutes to install a game. Not because of a 100 Mb write cap - I had an Intel X25-M 80 Gb, generation 1, which has a theoretical max write of 70 Mb/sec, and I said its performance had degraded due to the lack of trim support - AS-SSD revealed 10 Mb/sec on sequential writes, and ever lower on random. The game itself came on two DVDs and was about 14 Gb once installed. Crunch those numbers and you will see a minimum time of almost 24 minutes to write that 14 Gb of data, assuming it was all sequential writes of large files, which it wasn't.

Second, your call of "BS on raptor being faster". I didn't say the system was faster with the Raptor, if you care to read my post, I said it was less responsive, and I meant it. You didn't experience the system, so please don't try to tell me how it was. Let me give you an example - I start copying a single large file from my 2 TB storage drive to the Intel SSD - about 5 seconds into the process, the system becomes very poor to respond. I'm not talking about general slowness, I'm talking about even mouse movement locking up for about half a second at a time, every few seconds. Taking 15-20 seconds just to open Task Manager, more than a minute to open Firefox, that kind of thing. There were no other issues with my rig, as you put it, because as soon as I replaced this SSD with the OCZ one, doing a direct image from one to the other with Acronis TrueImage and changing nothing else, this problem was entirely gone and the system is fully responsive even during intense disk writing.

 

Sorry about the tone was a long day

I've done those task you have done on my friends system that has a G1 80GB intel and the system never felt unresponsive ever to the point where a raptor felt faster. now I didn't actually run a benchmark on it at the time so I cannot tell you if his was hitting 10 mb/sec in AS-SSD but I do know it was a 6 month old OS install.

I've never seen a SSD take 15-20 seconds to open Task manager even on those first gen POS SSD's with the jmicron controllers.

 

I have to say I dunno why anyone would buy the 120GB version. With the G3 coming out in Feb and the increase in performance this seems like a very retarded approach for Intel.

Unless Intel plans to release say the 160GB G3 for $300+ but for what you get that is not going to be worth buying. Anyone else see $200 price tag on the 160GB version (after the initial hype)