Intel X25-M SSD Review

The new 80GB X25-M is the blazing fast SSD just released from Intel that has knocked our socks off in testing. Our first chance to take a look at this drive is inside the HP EliteBook 8530w where it screamed through every single test we threw at it. Not only did this drive increase performance substantially across the board, but we also saw a significant jump in battery life. In this review of the HP EliteBook 8530w we cover the changes before and after the SSD upgrade, and show you just what you’d be missing if you couldn’t scrap together the funds for this drive.

HP EliteBook 8530w Specifications:

• Intel Core 2 Duo T9400 Processor (2.53GHz, 6MB L2 cache, 1066MHz FSB)
• Microsoft Genuine Windows Vista Business
• 15.4-inch WUXGA+ anti-glare (1920 x 1200)
• 512MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M Workstation GPU
• 4GB DDR2 800MHz RAM (2 x 2GB Configuration)
• 80GB Intel X25-M SSD (Up to 250MB/s Read, 70MB/s Write)
• Blu-Ray and DVD+/-RW Optical Drive
• WiFi, Ethernet, Modem, and Bluetooth Connectivity
• 8-Cell 73WHr Battery
• 3-Year on-site Warranty
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 14.0" x 10.4"
• Weight: 6.5lbs without power adapter, 8lbs with power adapter

Cost to upgrade

Everyone knows that you have to pay to play and with any upgrade to an SSD you need to pay quite a bit. At the time of this review the going street price of the 80GB Intel X25-M SSD is $660 online. On the HP website it will cost $524 to upgrade from a 160GB 7200RPM drive to the 80GB Intel SSD. You can also add a second hard drive or SSD in the EliteBook 8530w's Upgrade Bay (replaces the optical drive) for additional storage. TheIntel SSD will be available for sale on the HP wibsite with the 8530w onOctober 20th. While the price is steep by itself, it is only about thirty percent of the overall price of the above notebook configuration, and less still when compared to drives currently on the market. This upgrade isn’t for everyone, but I can say if you take a chance on this drive you won’t be disappointed.

Performance boost

Out of all the notebooks I have reviewed, and countless system components, no single item has ever given the overall speed bump that we witnessed from the Intel X25-M SSD. With just a swap of hard drive our HP EliteBook saw a huge bump in system speed from the first boot with a fast initial system load and Vista configuration, as well as a super snappy user interface. Little things such as clearing off system bloatware, which normally takes a bit of time as the system deletes files off the hard drive, happened almost instantly. As soon as we would select an application to uninstall and give the final confirmation the notebook would blip progress window and close it in a fraction of a second. Something was noticeably different with this system configuration, and from the first benchmark we ran we started to see why.

HDTune reported speeds as high as 192MB/s in some benchmark runs, with the average settling in at 182MB/s. Compared to most SSD’s in the 90MB/s range, or even our last SSD review with the 64GB Samsung model with 130MB/s average, this was a huge bump in speed. When you compare it to the fastest notebook drives that barely peak 80MB/s, or even the 10,000RPM Velociraptor desktop drive that peaks at 123MB/s you start to see just how fast this drive is. It should also be mentioned that while smoking other drives, it also runs perfectly silent and consumes less power than most notebook hard drives. Under full load being benchmarked the Intel X25-M SSD puts off barely a hint of heat, feeling cool to the touch at 83 degrees Fahrenheit recorded by our temperature gun.

HDTune for 7200.2 notebook hard drive:

HDTune for WD Velociraptor high performance desktop hard drive:

HDTune for Intel X25-M SSD:

The next benchmark in our list is PCMark05, which saw an astonishing jump in score from 6,287 in our original review to 9,452 with the Intel SSD. This is over a 3,000 point jump from a drive upgrade and nothing else. Both 3DMark06 and PCMark Vantage saw boosts in performance, but not as big of a jump as PCMark05. 3DMark06 went from 5,230 in the original review to 5,847 with the SSD. PCMark Vantage jumped from 3,944 to 5,516, over a 25% bump.

Battery life boost

To get almost three times speed from a drive, you would expect that system power usage would increase at least a little bit. In the Bizarro world with the Intel X25-M we saw the exact opposite, with power consumption levels dropping by more than 20%. In terms of real life performance under the same testing procedure using the balanced power profile, brightness set to 60%, and wireless enable battery life increased by 1 hour. In the original review we found battery life to top out at 3 hours and 38 minutes, and after the SSD upgrade the system managed 4 hours and 38 minutes before it went into sleep mode at 5% battery life remaining.

Conclusion

Intel really made a winning product with the X25-M 80GB SSD, blowing previous performance SSD models out of the water, while still being light on power consumption and heat output. While still pricy at $660 compared to standard hard drives, it isn’t nearly as bad as what SSDs used to cost even six months ago. For those looking to add this option to your notebook during customization, you are looking at $524 from HP at this time. In my eyes this is the best single upgrade for a notebook on the market, outside of going from an Intel Celeron to Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Pros:

• Super fast
• Low heat
• Improves battery life
• Single best individual component upgrade!

Cons:

• High price

 

I'll get a 2530p with such an SSD in once available (and possibly later, depending on money issues ).

This'll be the more or less best notebook then, ever...

The 500$+ is not much, for the gains in performance (espencially feelable performance) you get. as stated, the single best thing you can do to your notebook.

I've switched from a 4200rpm 1.8" to a mtron 3000 ssd now on my 2710p and the difference is amazing. This one will be the next big thing.

 

the performance is pretty sweet! AFAIK the prices for SSDs drop by 50% every year, so presumably next fall this drive will cost maybe $$250-300...

For performance and reliability sake I would get smth smaller (32gb is enough) but at a more reasonable price for an average person, and have a bigger/cheaper HDD to store videos/games/music/etc

 

I... want... this...

Anyone guessing when the price of this will drop down to more acceptable levels (i.e. $300 ish) ?

 

Nice performance, at least on paper. However, how much of what a normal user does actually depends on the storage device performance? PCMark may not be a fair indicator of the real life situation for most users.

It will be a while before these SSDs will be affordable at the 500GB capacity that I want. However, I could get most of the benefit of SSD if Intel would put 16GB of this technology onto a mini-PCIe card (ie Turbo Memory with a useful amount of storage) which I could then use together with a hard disk. However, with Intel moving into SSDs there's no financial incentive to develop Turbo Memory further.

John

 

The big question is where can I purchase this, especially in 1.8" form factor? I hope Intel makes these in large quantities and sell them to retailers so they can be purchased easily.

 

gotta get one of those

 

From 3D Mark 2006 html help :

So, can you now tell us how changing the drive can change the score because the formula DID NOT included any drive performance !

BTW, there is any writing test...

 

nice review!

 

well, everytime you wait, it's the disk. that's true for most work on a pc. bootup, file loading, app loading, etc. everytime you hear the disk you know it's the disks fault, everytime the light glows, it's the disks fault.

in normal daily business (private, work, etc) the disk is the MAJOR speedblocker. my 1.2ghz core2duo now beats my 2.4ghz core2quad (4x the clockcyclepower) easily on most daily usage cases. and that is with the mtron 3000. the intel one is much faster.

this thing is worth the 500$ premium. it's like getting a gamer high end gpu, but for the actual "everywhere where you think **** this notebook sucks / **** windows sucks its so slow and sluggish".

i still want to defrag my ssd..

 

Lower overall system temperature = lower resistance in all circuits = faster CPU/GPU performance with the same clocks?

I don't know, just a shot in the dark.

 

The need for SSD drives is becoming more a necessity with OS's like Vista that are bloated with millions of lines of code to boot etc... Personally, if Vista was not such a dog these SSD's would not be as needed. But as it is, I want one. Windows 7 sounds like it will be just as bad as Vista so we need SSD drives ASAP. Hopefully manufacturers can get the price down soon.

 

nice, as soon as that drive drops bellow 250 I'll buy one.

 

I think the [relatively] lower capacity should also be included as a Con. But nonetheless, SSD's are the future.

I wish you did a startup time comparison between SSD and HDD. That would be nice.

 

Can't wait until I can afford a 160gb one of these.

Greg

 

I wonder how does this drive stuck up against Samsung's 128GB SSD (the one used in X200s/X301, what's the model anyway?) in terms of performance and price

 

Indeed, thanks for the review.
I just heard this SSD will speed up Playstation 3 install times and loading times by 40% so I'll be getting it asap.

 

At least in terms of pricing, the Samsung 128GB drive can be purchased for $800, while the 1.8" version of the Intel drive costs $1000+ for only 80GB currently. I hope the pricing will get much better once they are actually available for sale.

 

the finny thing is you can get an 128 GB OCZ SSD for about $400 is this drive really worth the + $200 more?

 

Those cheap OCZ's have serious issues. Stuttering, making them slower than HDD's.

Greg

 

Those drives are so crap no one talks about them. You get what you pay for.

 

Yay! I got the pricing for the 1.8" version of this drive. It costs:

AU$1,809.83 Inc Gst
US$1,188.94

That is 60% of the cost of my notebook. Awesome price?

 

Very nice review!

If only I had the extra $500+ laying around, I would definitely upgrade to this drive (even though I'd lose 20Gb of space).

Maybe in another few years, when SSD prices go down, I'll look into this drive (unless inflation keeps the prices up...)

 

I thought the studdering in the OCZ's were do to the way windows was coded, and that under linux it runs well.

can anyone confirm? someone with linux and an OCZ drive?

 

Wow...

I can't believe how fast this thing is. I really want one in my next notebook.

 

I experienced freezes in the past few days with Intel SSD on my system.

In my case, when I was typing out my email using Outlook 2007 with Internet Explorer 7 on. My computer would all a sudden froze with an hour glass on the screen. Nothing operable except for the mouse. OMG at first you would freak out because you thought you would lose your email you just typed. The harddrive light indicator was also flashing brightly heavily. You wouldn't be able to do anything anymore with your computer for about 5 minutes and finally everything would return back to normal.

It's very annoying though. Currently, I already turned off prefetch and superfetch features within Vista as being recommended on
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/fo...ad.php?t=43525

I hope this problem resolves. Surely there is a problem with Outlook 2007 and SSD because I have seen my Outlook 2007 crashed(Non responding) few times in a day because when I re-opened my outlook, it would warn me that outlook was not closed properly and it would then undergo Data file check in progress with lower right corner little gear symbols.

Another thing that I considered to be a big problem when I was downloading a file from a website at 15KB/sec 50Mb File and my computer kept on frozen, while I was also browsing at the same time. So it was like 5minutes ok followed by 5minutes frozed, 5minutes ok, and 5 minutes frozen. God, that was annoying, until I had to cancel the downloading. Outlook and Opera were also in the open state not sure if this would affect dramatically.

Other than that, I haven't encountered any other problems(Finger crossed). Doing IM conversation has also been flawlessly. No stuttering no lagging.

"Are you running a computer that has a Solid State Drive (SSD)?
If you are running Outlook 2007 on a computer that has a solid state drive (SSD), you may experience frequent pauses when you perform typical operations in Outlook. The Outlook product team is aware of this issue and is investigating solutions for a future release.

If your computer is running on a computer that has both an SSD and a non-SSD (rotational) hard disk, you can reduce the frequency of the pauses by moving the .ost file or the .pst files to the non-SSD drive. For more information about how to move your Outlook Data Files, see the following article, "Introduction to Outlook data files," on the Office Online Web site: :
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA012308901033.aspx?pid=CH102499831033#2 ( http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA012308901033.aspx?pid=CH102499831033#2)
"
_________________
IBM T60 2623A24- 2GHz T7200, 3GB RAM, 80GB Intel X25-M SSD, 14" SAMSUNG LCD SXGA+ TFT, 128Mb X1400,
Intel 802.11abg wireless, BT, and Vista Business SP1, 9-Cell Battery

Vista:
Processor: 4.9
Memory: 4.6
Graphics: 4.6
Gaming Graphis: 4.0
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

 

this problem is a bug of outlook and independent on ssd. don't spread this around as such

 

That sucks that OCZ is still facing problems any news on a 128gb SSD intel?

 

That is a known problem with Outlook as Dave has said, it has been posted in the SSD Thread.

The OCZ is said to not have problems with Macs, which means that the problems are due to the NTFS file system. I don't research Linux at all, but if it uses a different FS then you should be fine.

Greg

 

you forgot to mention Intel SSD ISSUES!

ah I forgot, it is called a feature!

when the disk is 80% full, so you still have nice 16GB of space avaiable (16 times the amount of space of my first supersonic-expensive Pentium workstation) the speed of the drive is HALVED!

have you explored this area? I think it has been posted on anandtech, I am not sure...

or is Intel thinking that 80GB is way-too-much so we won't be able to use so much space these days or what? <grin>

My oppinion is that SSD disks have all sorts of baby problems and their time hasn't come yet, disabling indexing (which I need badly in vista, can't live w/o it), putting temporary files to ram drives or switching off page file (swap) completely just because of SSD is pure madness!

it is not! THIS IS SPARTAAAAAAAAAAA

edit: due to my mathematic at nearly 3am

 

the time for SSD has come, they don't have baby problems _IF_ you buy SLC.

i don't have to disable anything for my ssd, but it's an slc.

MLC does always have issues compared to SLC. they can hide it better and better, but never completely solve it.

and btw, try to fill an ordinary hd to 80% and then show me how it doesnt rapidly degrade in performance (espencially as fragmentation starts to to grow rapidly..).

(not to say the data access on the last bytes on an ordinary drive is at best about half as fast as the fastest parts, on 2.5" normally).

so you're still better off with the intel. but it's still sad. but yes, 80gb is wayy to much to fill it. i have to live with 32gb right now.. and 2.5tb storage at home

 

sorry guyz where can I buy one in europe?

 

thanks for the response, but suprisingly it is not about MLC vs SLC debate here...

one thing is that MLC data reliability is questioned, which I don't really care as I plan to use disk in notebook where I change them on year's basis...

the thing here is that somehow the (logic) buffer or something is getting full which forces the disk to do all sorts of problems, from freezing to BSOD... research OCZ forums, their disks controllers sucks badly but at least they are admiting it and posting all sorts of useful information to which I didn't dig deeply...

research is my area of thing but I don't research something with baby problems, they are really baby trust me...I just glanced on it, on the number of posts/threads and made my oppinion, I think if I went deeply it would be even worse...

you simply don't want to fill up memory/logic of SSD disk, so switching off prefetch/superfetch and other things is helping it, and these things do not have anything to do with MLC reliability...more or less they have to do with accessing the disk

hey, and btw, if I fill my disk to 80%, which will give me much bigger space to talk about but say it will be still only 16GB, I still have ENORMOUS space for defragmentation (perfect disk will handle it in a seconds...) if I don't have it defragmented already on background...

and my disk performance is THE SAME, till the last bit...yeah it is floating depending on which part of the magnetic disk I am accessing (outer/inner) but is almost the same...not dropping to half!

It is a BUG in the controller, and there are many such...

SSDs HAVE BABY PROBLEMS...

deal with it, compared to SSD magnetic disks looks like robust tanks covered with a radiactive shiled located 100m underneath the surface of mars whre no-one can touch them and runs milions of hours...

really, where was the last time your magnetic disk broke up? it is just a paranoia these days, they are cheap and quality made...not 500 quids for experiment from Intel/OCZ

thanks for reading my long post as I don't need to
(read: I would correct my mistakes but I am again too sleepy)

 

Can this be used on a Windows XP machine? Bah, the question is moot for me, since by the time these drop in price enough, I'll have a Windows 7 PC (unless I win a MegaMillions jackpot before then ).

 

yes this can be used on a Windows XP machine. My supertalent 128 gb SSD is working fine without any problems.

 

Another good thing is I'll never have to listen to that disgusting noise every time the bloody hard drive is working. I love SSD's and cannot wait till they are in every single computer and readily available. I really really like the read performance, but why is it so hard to get the write performance up there? It seems as though the SLC is faster though than the MLC which is odd.

 

From my limited knowledge, writes are harder to improve because no matter how you improve the technology, there's always going to be delays in each latch when you change their values.

Reads, on the other hand, do not change the latches values, ever. Hence reads have a speed advantage over writes in the same medium.

 

I've read the whole

It's still about MLC vs SLC here. SLC have different child issues. The write behaviour is completely different and thus the things that happen to intel as well as all the jmicron controller ssds just don't happen to SLC disks.

and notebook disks have on the slower parts about half the bandwith than in the faster parts..

but i agree with you on most points anyways. no big difference. I just have an SSD right now, and it's an SLC, and any drop in speed that could occur does simply NOT matter as it's so much faster than any hdd was. the much smaller read latency makes up for anything.

I'm thinking of getting a 2530p, and there'll be the intel ssd in. I'm interested if one is able to put one 1.8" and one 2.5" disk in (and no cdrom as I have no need for that one). Then, I would get one of the intel slc disks that are out soon, + the default mlc disk. that would be a beast then

 

The 2530p will support dual HDD, a 1.8" SATA standard drive in the normal HDD bay and a 2.5" SATA drive in the Upgrade bay in place of the DVD drive.

 

Some users have reported problems with freezing, slow performance with Microsoft Outlook.

See OCZ SSD forum for a discussion of the issues.

 

I have an Intel x25 SSD in my HP HDX18 and I get pauses in Outlook as well as stuttering when I type messages in Windows Live Messenger. Other than that, the drive is amazingly fast and improves the laptop 100%.

 

Anyone have this installed in a new unibody macbook pro? I hear it runs flawless but the only issue is that you cant install windows via bootcamp, but it has no known issues of freezing, stuttering or any sort of problems.

 

Try downloading some other sort of MSN client, like aMsn.

 

The battery life boost is moot.


The previous battery test on the laptop was run in HIGH PERFORMANCE mode.... this one was run in the Balanced profile....... this probably accounts for most, if not all of the increase...