MaximumPC 2008 12

H

ow big a deal is Intel’s entry into

the solid-state-drive game? The

announcement of the company’s

new X-25M SSD, and a faster version for

enthusiasts, all but overshadowed details of

the company’s next-generation CPU at its

fall developer conference.

Aft er testing Intel’s entry-level SSD, we

can understand why. The X-25M off ers the

fastest read speeds we’ve ever seen from a

single SSD or hard drive.

How fast? The 10,000rpm Western

Digital Velociraptor (reviewed September

2008) off ered sustained transfer speeds of

98MB/s. The $1,500 MemoRight MR25.2-

32/64S GT from our SSD roundup (Novem-

ber 2008) turned in read speeds of 112MB/s.

The Intel X-25M hits 206MB/s read speeds.

Not all is roses though. The X-25M SSD

is based on the more-aff ordable multilevel

chip (MLC) technology. The Achilles’ heel

of MLC drives is subpar write performance.

For example, the RiData and Super Talent

MLC-based drives in our seven-drive SSD

roundup averaged write speeds of about

23MB/s. The X25-M is almost three times

faster than the other MLCs, but it can’t touch

the write speed of drives that are based on

single-level chip (SLC) memory. The slowest

SLC drives hover in the 80MB/s range, with

the faster drives pushing 100MB/s.

The X-25M SSD took a hit in our Pre-

miere Pro benchmark, in which we write an

uncompressed Microsoft AVI to the drive.

The Velociraptor hard drive continues to

be the best performer in our Premiere Pro

benchmark, with the Memoright SSD com-

ing in a close second.

That’s probably the only thing that

dampens our enthusiasm for this drive.

The X-25M’s read speeds are simply to

die for—you’d have to run lesser SSDs or

hard drives in RAID 0 to even come close.

Just think about what you’d get from two

X-25Ms in RAID 0.

This is just one of many SSDs you can

expect from Intel. The company plans to

release a 160GB SSD next year. For enthu-

siasts, Intel will soon introduce the X-25E,

with 250MB/s reads and 170MB/s writes.

Because it will use SLC technology, though,

it’ll be far pricier.

As for the X-25M, we’re unimpressed

by its write performance, but since its read

speeds are twice as fast as those of the other

SSDs we’ve tested, and it costs about a third

of what the fastest SLC drive on the market

runs, we have no choice but to pronounce it

Kick Ass worthy. –G O R D O N M A H U N G

IN THE LAB^

REVIEWS OF THE LATEST HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE

Intel X-25M

Get RAID 0 read

performance in a

single drive

90 | MAXIMUMPC | DEC 08 | http://www.maximumpc.com

VERDICT

$600, http://www.intel.com

9

Pushes the limits of

the SATA 3GB inter-

face!

Write speed is just

average.

PARADIDDLE

INTEL X-25M

PARAGLIDER

Intel X25-M Memoright MR25.2-032/64S Western DigitalVelociRaptor

Capacity 80GB 64GB 300GB

Average Sustained Transfer Rate Read (MB/s) 206.65 112.47 98.31

Average Sustained Transfer Rate Write (MB/s) 64.30 106.60 98.22

Random Access Read (ms) 0.12 0.09 7.24

Random Access Write 0.09 1.46 3.42

Premiere Pro (sec) 621 411 383

PCMark Vantage Overall Score 30,322 13,527 6,082

Best scores are bolded. Our test bed consists of an EVGA 680i SLI motherboard running an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 CPU, an EVGA 8800 GTX

videocard, 2GB of DDR2/800 RAM, and a 7,200 RPM Western Digital 500GB Caviar drive. Windows XP SP3 is used for the H2WBench and Premiere Pro CS3 scores and Windows Vista Home Premium is used for the PCMark Vantage score.

BENCHMARKS

Laptop users, rejoice—you fi nally get

desktop-drive level performance.