I bought an Intel X25-M 80GB and it arrived yesterday, and I have it up and running tonight and I have to say that this is undoubtably the most amazing improvement that I've made in my system in as long as I can remember. The only thing that I can remember like this is the time that I bought a 3Dfx Voodoo 3D card and used it to play my first 3D accelerated game.
Vista 64 boots to the desktop in ~22 seconds from the "press any key to boot from CD" until the desktop appears. And the system is immediately responsive when the desktop appears - you can click on things and they come right up as if Vista's not busy loading a whole lot of stuff. The drive is absolutely quiet - which is a bit weird actually - but weird in a nice way. It's completely cool - in fact, it's made out of metal that feels like thick brushed aluminum and it feels cold to the touch. I'm a gamer and Warhammer launches in literally half the time that it used to and the loading sequences between zones feels much faster than it used to. Everything feels much faster than it used to. Even little programs like iTunes, and Firefox that never felt particularly slow feel like they are way faster to load and come up.
I'm upgrading from a Hitatchi 1TB Deskstar - I presume if I had a WD Raptor or Velociraptor, or some RAID0 setup that I wouldn't be so impressed. But coming off of a fairly fast single 7200rpm 1TB drive, this drive is a massive improvement
On the negatives, well, 80GB is pretty small. I had a hard time fitting my Vista Ultimate 64 directory tree, my Program Files and Program Files (x86) directories onto it with room to spare for a couple of my favorite games. I have about 7GB free. And there's still a bunch of games that are left on my "old" 1TB drive. It's supposed to be low power - but 80GB is too little for me to actually use (my photo library alone is 300GB.. the problem of RAW mode and a DSLR), so I have to keep my 1TB drive plugged in. So about the best that I can say is that it probably doesn't add a lot more power to my system. Also on the negatives, I'll admit that I bought mine because I get an employee discount from Intel, and if I hadn't received that discount, I'd be sitting on the sidelines waiting for the prices to drop.
But aside from the small capacity and the retail price, I am amazed. I can tell you that when you can get something a reasonably sized SSD that has performance like this X25-M for something that you consider a reasonable price, you should get one. Because it really makes a huge difference.
Lastly, if I were reading some Intel employee gushing about his new Intel drive, I'd be inclined to be skeptical... although in my defense, Anand sort of gushed in his review too (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...wdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=17). But I think I am first and foremost a hardware geek, and I'm writing here because I'm really excited not because I expect to increase Intel's sales of these things. For one thing, the retail price is more than I think most people - including myself - are comfortable with... and 80GB is pretty small. But I'm excited, and I've been posting at Anandtech for years and so I'm posting my excitement here... because my wife was not at all impressed... so who else am I going to tell.
My system:
Core 2 Duo E6700, 4GB DDR2-667 ECC, DFI Infinity 975X motherboard, 512MB GeForce 8800GT, Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, Hitatchi 1TB Desktstar HD, Vista Ultimate 64-bit.
* Not a spokesperson for Intel Corp.
Vista 64 boots to the desktop in ~22 seconds from the "press any key to boot from CD" until the desktop appears. And the system is immediately responsive when the desktop appears - you can click on things and they come right up as if Vista's not busy loading a whole lot of stuff. The drive is absolutely quiet - which is a bit weird actually - but weird in a nice way. It's completely cool - in fact, it's made out of metal that feels like thick brushed aluminum and it feels cold to the touch. I'm a gamer and Warhammer launches in literally half the time that it used to and the loading sequences between zones feels much faster than it used to. Everything feels much faster than it used to. Even little programs like iTunes, and Firefox that never felt particularly slow feel like they are way faster to load and come up.
I'm upgrading from a Hitatchi 1TB Deskstar - I presume if I had a WD Raptor or Velociraptor, or some RAID0 setup that I wouldn't be so impressed. But coming off of a fairly fast single 7200rpm 1TB drive, this drive is a massive improvement
On the negatives, well, 80GB is pretty small. I had a hard time fitting my Vista Ultimate 64 directory tree, my Program Files and Program Files (x86) directories onto it with room to spare for a couple of my favorite games. I have about 7GB free. And there's still a bunch of games that are left on my "old" 1TB drive. It's supposed to be low power - but 80GB is too little for me to actually use (my photo library alone is 300GB.. the problem of RAW mode and a DSLR), so I have to keep my 1TB drive plugged in. So about the best that I can say is that it probably doesn't add a lot more power to my system. Also on the negatives, I'll admit that I bought mine because I get an employee discount from Intel, and if I hadn't received that discount, I'd be sitting on the sidelines waiting for the prices to drop.
But aside from the small capacity and the retail price, I am amazed. I can tell you that when you can get something a reasonably sized SSD that has performance like this X25-M for something that you consider a reasonable price, you should get one. Because it really makes a huge difference.
Lastly, if I were reading some Intel employee gushing about his new Intel drive, I'd be inclined to be skeptical... although in my defense, Anand sort of gushed in his review too (http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...wdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=17). But I think I am first and foremost a hardware geek, and I'm writing here because I'm really excited not because I expect to increase Intel's sales of these things. For one thing, the retail price is more than I think most people - including myself - are comfortable with... and 80GB is pretty small. But I'm excited, and I've been posting at Anandtech for years and so I'm posting my excitement here... because my wife was not at all impressed... so who else am I going to tell.
My system:
Core 2 Duo E6700, 4GB DDR2-667 ECC, DFI Infinity 975X motherboard, 512MB GeForce 8800GT, Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, Hitatchi 1TB Desktstar HD, Vista Ultimate 64-bit.
* Not a spokesperson for Intel Corp.
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