Hard disk have been the staple storage devices for desktop and notebook PCs for God knows how long, and they’ve served us well. For the most part, we’ve seen improvements in transfer and read/write speeds, and capacities. Although we’ve been content with the enhancements, other factors like longevity, noise, portability and endurance became issues of concern due to the popularity of the notebook market and the gaming community. For this reason the development of Solid-State-Disks (SSD) began some time back and now we’re seeing it bear fruit. Intel sent over our very first SSD in the form of X25-M.
SSD are a major evolution in the area of storage. The most obvious difference between HDDs and SSDs is that the latter doesn’t use any mechanical or moving parts. This means that SSDs are much faster, noiseless, more compact, and are less vulnerable to impact. Internally, SSDs consists of several cells with transistors. When writing data, electrical charges are applied to the transistors, which tunnels electrons into and out of a ‘floating gate’. When no voltage is applied, the electrons stay in the gate and that’s when your data is stored. This is of course a very basic explanation of how SSD works. Now there are two different types of memory in SSDs: Single-Level Cell (SLC) and Multi-Level Cell (MLC). Essentially, both take up the same die area, but SLC stores 1-bit per cell while MLC stores 2-bits, which results it being twice the capacity as the former. However, SLC only use two voltages (0 and 1) since it’s 1-bit while MLC has to worry about four states (00,01,10,11), thus MLC takes longer to access. But the difference is in nanoseconds; hardly something to be concerned about.
As we mentioned earlier, MLC is based on the same die area as SLC. With more cells manufactured on a single die, MLC is practically more cost effective and therefore cheaper than SLC drives. The only downside to MLC drives is that they have a shorter lifespan than SLC drives. The X25-M is based on the MLC design and thus belongs to the mainstream category as denoted by the ‘M’ suffix. From the image above, it’s hard to imagine how big it is. But in fact, it’s really small; 2.5” wide, 3.9” long, and 0.2” thick to be precise.
We benchmarked the drive with good old HDTachRW and Pcmark Vantage, and the results were phenomenal. In HDTachRW, the X-25 had a sequential average read speed of 225.8MB/s while it burst speed is about 253MB/s. What really blew us away is the score that HDD suite produced, and that is a whopping mega figure of 37,440. The highest we’ve ever gotten with the Raptor X was only 4,993 b the way.
It’s hard not to be immensely impressed with Intel’s X25-M, especially after you’ve seen how fast it can be. But the sad thing is that it only has 89GB of space. Just like any new hardware, high price tags are given since it’s a new technology. Eventually, manufacturing costs will drop so rest assure that you’ll get your hands on one later.
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