Intel X-25M Solid Sate Drive Review
Solid State Drives, or SSDs as they are better known, are well on their way to replacing the good old HDD we have all grown up with. SSDs offer faster data transfer, shorter boot times, uses less power and generate less heat. Also because there are no moving parts, SSDs have less that can go wrong. But everything has a down side, right? And the downside here is the cost. With a price range of between $363 and $ 445 for 80 GB, it is expensive. If you take the cost as being about $400, that works out to $5 per GB which is not so nice. So is it worth the cost?
SSDs have been around for some time and have been getting progressively better. Intel’s X-25M is a quantum step ahead as far as performance goes. There are all kinds of tests that have been done to show how fast SSDs are as compared to traditional HDDs and there’s no point in rehashing all that. The bottom line is that the data transfer speed of the X-25M are up to 40% faster than an HDD. Boot times are up to 20% faster. That’s much better than even the performance of the earlier generation of SSDs. And for the user, the advantages are obvious.
SSDs consume less power than HDDs because there are no moving parts. Once again the X-25m’s performance in this regards shows an improvement of about 25% over the earlier SSDs. Its operating temperature is the same as other SSDs and this still is considerably lower than HDDs, resulting in less cooling being needed which again extends laptop battery life.
While all this is great, what every user wants to know about is reliability. Disk crashes are still nightmare scenarios. An SSD is inherently more reliable than a HDD because there are no moving parts to go wrong. While no X-25M specific data is available, studies have shown that an SSD has a life of about 100,000 read-write cycles before the memory begins to wear out. While this may not sound like much, it can be compared to writing 10GB of data to the SSD everyday for five years before you get signs of trouble. That should be good enough for nearly everyone.
The X-25M is available in both 2.5 and 1.8 inch seizes and is beginning to appear in a number of laptops.
So should you buy it? Honestly, no. It is a great piece of technology and represents the future of PC and Notebook data storage. But replacing what you have with the X-25M just doesn’t seem worthwhile. The additional benefits you get for the money you pay just do not make sense. When you are buying your next PC or Laptop / Notebook, look for one that has an X-25M or some other good SSD. It may be more expensive than a model with a traditional HDD, but the price differential is worth it. But buying one to replace what you already have is not a differential cost; it is a complete additional expense.
Rating:
Performance – 5/5
Reliability / Quality – 4/5
Value for money – 2/5