It was only two days ago that they finally
became official, but already we've got a couple of reviews springing up to tell us all about the second generation X25-M SSDs from Intel.
PC Perspective kick things off with a full examination of the new drive, finding plenty of good (improved random reads and writes), some bad (minor fragmentation issues under extreme use scenarios) and pretty much no ugly. Not to be outdone,
Anandtech have dissected the drive and compared its innards with the older generation hardware, while also running a few benchmarks for good measure. The conclusion in both camps is that while Intel has improved the hardware side of things, it is the drastically reduced price that makes the X25-M G2 the best choice in the consumer SSD space. Navigate past the break for a pricing chart, but remember that retail cost will be a bit steeper, should you be able to snag one in the wild.
Read - HotHardware review
Read - PC Perspective review
Read - Anandtech preview
posted Jul 23rd 2009 5:48AM
WHen Price per GB is @ $2 and count me in!!!
It's almost there. I guesstimate about another 12-18 months. Although, I really would like a bit more space a 320GB would be ideal for me.
I'd say $2/GB will be less than 12 months, hopefully, but it seems that unless everyone else catches up with random read/write performance, we might end up with a two-tier SSD market. People like Intel on one side, everyone else on the other.
For me, it'd have to be about $1/GB AND great random read/write performance before I can really jump onboard.
Whent the cost gets below 40¢ per GB count me in. I'll use it as a primary drive but It wont be replacing my hard drives for mass storage.
will these fit in my playstation and help keep it cool???
Why would you put a SSD in your PS3? Yes it would fit because its a default 2.5" drive but don't see the point IMO
Yea, I find that odd. I saw a few reviewers on Newegg doing this, getting SSD's for their PS3's. I honestly don't see the point.
Like he said, to help keep it cool. The fans are loud.
To have a silent drive, perhaps ...
What about the 320GB version? I want that one for my MacBook Pro....
LOL--- for a sec there i thought you where talking that you can upgrade your Macbook pro
@EI8HT
*Rolls eyes*
LOL--- for a sec there i thought you knew what you "where" talking about... then Google told me that yeah, the MBP is as upgradable as any other laptop.
Wow way to suck at spelling and therefore ruin your whole comeback. Its spelled "were"
vtk, he was imitating the troll's way of spelling were.
Is he a dumb troll, or does the bad economy make him have to troll harder?
Wow, these prices are awesome! I was going to get an OCZ Summit for $389, but why not spend $51 more for the X25-M 160GB, and I get 32 MORE GB's than I was going to get. And I know Intel's SSD's will be faster and better than anything else out there right now. SO worth it, DO WANT!
True, these prices may seems expensive ... but if you see the prices of SSD just 2 years ago (8 to 10 time of the current price).. you will think ... wow ...these prices are awesome!
by my calculation the SSD will cost $1 per GB in 2011 and by 2016/2017 it will be 1 cent/GB so 10 TB SSD disk will cost you $100.
Wait for 34nm from other manufacturers... OCZ will clearly be cheaper than Intel per GB when they get new flash from Samsung.
Low write speeds seem to be the only problem with these drives...
But, read speeds are incredibly fast... and won't that make a huge difference in how fast your computer operates?
they still tend to be 2x/3x faster writes then normal hdds, Raptors get like a 70mpbs while normal harddrives closer to 50mbps. these sit anywhere from 150-250mbps
sequential write is lower than other SSDs, but that is not a problem in everyday use (unless you keep moving large files as part of your everyday activities). The random access performance is what makes a big difference in normal use (boot time, launching apps, etc)
I hope you don't plan on doing nothing but copying huge files to this SSD...
Anyway, the Random Write Speeds of this SSD are like 100x faster than normal HDs. That's where the difference is made.
Their low seq. write speed is a direct result of the architecture that leads to the high random write speeds (the block size is smaller). Unless you are transferring files from an external eSATA RAID array, or writing a ton of data from RAM, you won't notice. But similarly, Intel's massive random write performance is total overkill for regular user applications, and can really only be put to use in a server scenario where you have high speed writes to app log files or database/ database logging files.
Overall though, The primary performance increase from an SSD comes from the incredible low random access time. Even crappy SSDs manage huge random read performance, and this leads to very fast boot up times, application launch times, etc. Also, loading large files into RAM will benefit greatly from the similarly huge sequential read performance.
"PC Perspective kick things off with a full examination"
kick or kicked... ( yes some of us read the post before adding comments )
I'm buying the 160gb for my x200t the minute it hits canada! I wasn't sure what I've been waiting for but I'm pretty sure it's this! :)
I'm in when it hits $.10/GB.
So hurry up and start buying these so you can drive the price down.
Shouldn't it be the opposite though? I thought prices go down when demand isn't there...
Are you kidding me? How cheap can you get.
3 years ago, everyone was *dreaming* of the day when fast SSDs would reach $10/GB.
1.5 years ago, everyone was dreaming of the day when fast SSDs would reach $5/GB.
Now you can get the fastest (MLC) drives on the market for under $3/GB. You can get a 64GB boot drive for $200 or less. 128GB for < $350. People easily spend more on GPUs, and yet an SSD is the single most important upgrade you can make to a computer for overall performance. It's really like night and day versus even a 10K raptor.
Not even into the second paragraph of the PC Perspective review and there's already a problem:
"These drives were reportedly faster in every way, with higher capacity to boot"
These drives have the same capacity and the same sequential write and read speeds. This guy is off to a bad start.
Perhaps you should actually read the review. While not a massive increase, the gen2 drives are 5-10% faster even if Intel lists the same speed.
I read the review from start to finish. The reviewer stated "these drives were REPORTEDLY faster in every way".
Reported by whom? Intel stated that the sequential write speed and capacity of these drives were identical to the G1 drives.
My point stands.
I've got 4 in stock right now..Who wants them?
Too late, I already bought them. Raid 5'ing them as we speak. Eat em suckers!
Sequential read performance is still not that great...
I'm not as savvy on these things, but do you need a certain type of motherboard to support a drive like this?
Thinking of getting a new laptop and wanted to pop one of these suckers in there, but obviously if you have the manufacturer do it it's like a $700-900 option.