Should I get the Intel X25-V 40GB SSD?

[lsquare]

I've been thinking about getting an SSD for a while now, but I can't justify a purchase until now. I'm currently running a dual drive configuration with my 150GB Velociraptor as my boot drive / OS drive. I'm tempted to go with the Intel SSD for the speed, but I'm not sure if the benefits are worth it because the write speed on that drive is crap relative to the other higher end SSDs. The question here is despite the lackluster write speed of the Intel SSD, is it still faster than the Velociraptor? Of course, if I get the OCZ 60GB Vertex Drive or even the Intel 80GB, then problem solve, but it's just too expensive for a storage solution. My plan is if the 40GB drive is fast enough to do what I need it to do, then I'll get that and later in the year, get a larger SSD, then move the Intel 40GB drive to my laptop. So is it worth getting the drive now or I should wait until Q4 2010 before upgrading?

Also, does the Intel 40GB SSD support Trim under Windows 7?

 

[caspur]

Don't use SSDs as storage solutions. They are for applications and operating systems.

You always want to have a spindle disk for storage, at least for the foreseeable future.

Wait until the 80gb X-25m goes on sale (no need to pay the markup right now). They are about $210, which is no more expensive than that Velociraptor when it was new. Intel did firesale a few X25M's for $130 during Dec. for retail employees, but that is pretty rare.

The X25M is a far better drive than the V series. It's damn near as good as the X25-E, which is obscenely expensive for home use, though the E series has a longer lifespan. Not sure if that is important to you or not.

 

[lsquare]

Don't use SSDs as storage solutions. They are for applications and operating systems.

You always want to have a spindle disk for storage, at least for the foreseeable future.

Wait until the 80gb X-25m goes on sale (no need to pay the markup right now). They are about $210, which is no more expensive than that Velociraptor when it was new. Intel did firesale a few X25M's for $130 during Dec. for retail employees, but that is pretty rare.

The X25M is a far better drive than the V series. It's damn near as good as the X25-E, which is obscenely expensive for home use, though the E series has a longer lifespan. Not sure if that is important to you or not.

Did you even read the op man? I already said I'm going to be ussing it as a boot drive.

 

[Emulex]

yeah it is a fast drive - very very fast and does do trim

 

[adairusmc]

I bought one recently to replace a Raptor as my boot drive, and I am extremely happy with how fast it is. Go for it.

 

[MrK6]

In all honesty I would wait. SSD's are only going to get cheaper, and I don't think you'll see much of a difference. I had a dual 1TB Caviar Black setup (non-RAID) and switched my boot drive to a 160GB X25-M. It was no doubt faster than my Caviar Blacks, but not enough for me to enthusiastically recommend it. I imagine your 150GB Velociraptor is as fast as a short-stroked 1TB Caviar Black, and the X25-V 40GB is slower than the 160GB X25-M - I think you'll be disappointed with the performance increase, if there's any at all. Note that you will see a boost in boot time, but in general applications (from Word to gaming and everything in between) there isn't much difference.

 

[Lee Saxon]

Hmmm

One guy upgrades from a Raptor to an X-25V and is impressed with the speed boost.

One guy upgrades from a Caviar Black to the much faster X-25M and is not impressed with the speed boost.

Sounds like either adairusmc had an older slower Raptor (current one is about as fast as the Caviar Black) or MrK6 has some other bottleneck. But which is it?

 

[pcslookout]

In all honesty I would wait. SSD's are only going to get cheaper, and I don't think you'll see much of a difference. I had a dual 1TB Caviar Black setup (non-RAID) and switched my boot drive to a 160GB X25-M. It was no doubt faster than my Caviar Blacks, but not enough for me to enthusiastically recommend it. I imagine your 150GB Velociraptor is as fast as a short-stroked 1TB Caviar Black, and the X25-V 40GB is slower than the 160GB X25-M - I think you'll be disappointed with the performance increase, if there's any at all. Note that you will see a boost in boot time, but in general applications (from Word to gaming and everything in between) there isn't much difference.

\


I see the same thing.

 

[Engineer]

\


I see the same thing.

I did too (when going from WD640GB Blue to OCZ Vertex 120GB) until....I went back the blue, lol. Really, it isn't as earth shattering as I thought, especially after reading so many reviews state how far of a leap it was. I guess if you run benchmarks all day and heavy disk intensive stuff, it would be great. I'm not buying another one until the price goes way down or the speed goes through the roof "compared" to my current one! :biggrin:

 

[adairusmc]

Hmmm

One guy upgrades from a Raptor to an X-25V and is impressed with the speed boost.

One guy upgrades from a Caviar Black to the much faster X-25M and is not impressed with the speed boost.

Sounds like either adairusmc had an older slower Raptor (current one is about as fast as the Caviar Black) or MrK6 has some other bottleneck. But which is it?

Well, mine was a 150gb Raptor drive, so it isn't an older one (had it maybe a year or so). The boot times are a little better, not huge, but the machine is definitely running faster than it ever did with the Raptor. Windows performance score went from about 5.3 (not sure exactly what it was, I didn't pay attention to it before - just going off of some old screenshots) to 6.8 now.

 

[Emulex]

you'll never reach latency with any hard drive setup as the crappiest intel ssd. in fact you may even raise latency if the two drives (raid-0) can't seek to the correct spot as fast as one single drive

 

[c0balt]

My unscientific result is that I couldn't be happier with my first SSD (SuperTalent GX 64GB.) I went from 2x6400AAKS in RAID0.

I rarely wait on anything anymore. If I start a program it just fires right up. Everything is that much smoother. Regular use of four instances of Firefox w/ SessionManager and 250+ tabs is perfectly sane with this setup (painful with the old drives.)

Media Center acts like the polished TiVo interface now instead of some POS hobbled-together TV app. I have to think that everyone at M$ that actually uses MC to watch and record TV regularly MUST own an SSD.

I don't reboot often but when I do it's nice to not have to wait nearly as long. This would come in VERY handy with OC'ing a new setup and the many boot iterations.

My bench's are not blinding fast, perhaps as I'm on an SB710, but I'm totally happy with the end result, and as many have said before me, I wish I had done this upgrade a long time ago.

I only wish I had chosen two smaller drives to get the advantages of RAID. And that I'd gone with OCZ to get their terrific support. I've written a bunch about my experience with getting the drive and setting up the system over on the [H] HotDeals thread.

 

[fffblackmage]

I did too (when going from WD640GB Blue to OCZ Vertex 120GB) until....I went back the blue, lol. Really, it isn't as earth shattering as I thought, especially after reading so many reviews state how far of a leap it was.

I was expecting earth shattering performance from my 60GB Agility as well. The first thing I "noticed" was faster boot times. However, since I had a fresh install of Win7, I just thought maybe it was always this fast for a fresh install. After a few more days, I am starting to appreciate the snappiness my new SSD brings to my laptop.

 

[Engineer]

I was expecting earth shattering performance from my 60GB Agility as well. The first thing I "noticed" was faster boot times. However, since I had a fresh install of Win7, I just thought maybe it was always this fast for a fresh install. After a few more days, I am starting to appreciate the snappiness my new SSD brings to my laptop.

You become "spoiled" over time and then forget how good you have it. That's exactly what happened when I temporarily imaged my SSD back to the WD 640GB drive and it was noticeable. There are some areas that don't seem as fast as I would like them but I'm not so sure that it's not a Windows 7 issue more than the SSD at this point (learning both at the same time).

I would like to have one for my work laptop but it's an old, old, old IDE ATA model so no go. Maybe I'll request a new laptop before the place closes down in the next few months...and get a SSD for it too! :biggrin:

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

You become "spoiled" over time and then forget how good you have it. That's exactly what happened when I temporarily imaged my SSD back to the WD 640GB drive and it was noticeable. There are some areas that don't seem as fast as I would like them but I'm not so sure that it's not a Windows 7 issue more than the SSD at this point (learning both at the same time).

I would like to have one for my work laptop but it's an old, old, old IDE ATA model so no go. Maybe I'll request a new laptop before the place closes down in the next few months...and get a SSD for it too! :biggrin:

It depends on what you came from. If you went from a raptor to a ssd it's more of an incremental upgrade than the revolutionary change you get going from a 7200 drive.

If you're getting a 40gig make sure you hang on to your 150. 40gigs runs out fast.

 

[MrK6]

You become "spoiled" over time and then forget how good you have it. That's exactly what happened when I temporarily imaged my SSD back to the WD 640GB drive and it was noticeable. There are some areas that don't seem as fast as I would like them but I'm not so sure that it's not a Windows 7 issue more than the SSD at this point (learning both at the same time).

This is an interesting notion and I would tend to agree. However, I did just install my last 1TB Caviar Black in a friend's new rig and it is still just as fast as I remember. I think my comparison is still valid, though this could be a more of a compliment to the Caviar Blacks rather than a detraction of the X25-M or SSD's in general.

 

[Voo]

This is an interesting notion and I would tend to agree. However, I did just install my last 1TB Caviar Black in a friend's new rig and it is still just as fast as I remember. I think my comparison is still valid, though this could be a more of a compliment to the Caviar Blacks rather than a detraction of the X25-M or SSD's in general.

Seems to depend on the person. I used the PC of a friend several times the last few days and I definatly noticed the difference.. wouldn't want to use it the whole time.


Just starting up several applications at the same time, especially disk intense stuff (small database server for testing purposes, eclipse, photoshop, VMs..) does take way longer than it "should". Probably depends on the workload and how annoyed you get by small waiting times (I really don't like interrupts in my work flow).

Though I've never used a raptor, so I can't comment on the difference between 10k drive--> ssd..

 

[Emulex]

don't forget the noise - i hate hard drive noise

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

The first 5 or so posts in this thread are not very well grounded. The X25-V is a great way to get SSD performance and save some change until the SATA 3.0 SSDs come out. The X25-V is quick enough and it's got the same G2 controller as the X25-M (right?) so you have a good base and TRIM support, but it's just only running 5 NAND channels instead of the full 10 as in the -M. Also, if it's the same as the Kingston SSDNow V the cache DRAM is slower than the -M. But, like I said, it's still very fast. Faster than a WD Black. I have both in this desktop.

 

[Emulex]

its 75% as fast as the 160gb x25-m at reading (which is insane fast) and maybe 20% as fast writing but you do 90% reads versus writes. so this totally smokes any consumer drive when you factor in near zero latency.

wonder how 5 channels equates to 75% read speed of 10 channels? magic?

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

wonder how 5 channels equates to 75% read speed of 10 channels? magic?

The DRAM cache (on both models) is probably slowing it down, and then the SATA 2.0 interface is a limit for the -M, too, so then why would they use a faster DRAM if the SATA 2.0 interface is the bottleneck? Intel should be selling a SATA 3.0 version right f'ing now with these bottlenecks fixed. Anyway, I'm just taking a stab in the dark.

 

[43st]

I went from a Raptor to a 80Gb G2. It is much faster but...

I only really game and browse the internet on my home computer.. so I rarely feel the effects of the SSD. Sometimes if I download stuff and install some new things it'll be smoking fast, but for the day to day (internet and gaming in my case) it's totally not worth it.

Power user doing tons of stuff on your PC = Get SSD now!
Gaming and internet use = not really worth it now.

 

[Seven]

I made a switch last year from a raptor to a SSD and haven't looked back and probably never will.

 

[Emulex]

the noise - oh yeah there is no noise! silence is beauty.

if i could bury my DVR hard drive i'd have so much silence (laptops ssd, pc ssd). bugs the carp out of me.

 

[jimhsu]

SSDs are bought to reduce the "annoyance" factor in computing. This is from experience.

Try these tests:
- Measure the time it takes between when you type a word into Vista/7's start menu and the time that an item comes up
- Measure Photoshop's load time while running an antivirus scan on the same drive.
- Measure the time to Windows startup until you can actually launch something.

There are several other examples...

I notice that long-term system performance degrades much less with SSD setups. New hard drive setups are also very fast, but there's the inevitable "degrading" effect that typically comes after several months after a clean install.

Also with lifespan, unless you record videos or something daily on the drive, the difference is something like 10 years for the M vs. 100 years for the E (assuming you use hard drives that long). I've had my G2 for 6 months, and writes so far are about 5 TB (that's 64 * 80GB, approximately). For an absolute worst case scenario of 1000 write cycles (really, you should use 10000), my drive will last 7.8 years with current usage. Again, that's assuming you will use the thing that long.