[Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

[[CA]1|Sgt.MG42]

I had always wanted to test out an SSD and see how it stacked up against my WD Raptor, but the price was prohibitive.

I resolved to go with an Intel drive for the following reasons:

• Amazing random writes performance (blows every other SSD out of the water)
• No slowdown after extended use (aging)
• No stuttering issues.
• Best "Wear leveling" and largest buffer (256 KB as opposed to 16KB on other controllers).

Mwave.com had an X28-M 80Gb at $289.99 shipped (about $30 cheaper than anywhere else) so I jumped on it. I was looking at a sound system upgrade, but that can wait!

Let me tell you that you have to use an SSD to believe the difference it makes to load times and windows responsivity. It simply blew my WD Raptor right out of the water in terms of tangiable performance! Simply wow! The OS loads about 10x faster than a regular HDD. No delay in the program group icons/taskbar stuff to load up...I'm a convert, never again will I buy magnetic drives!

Now onto benchmarks:

Raptor

SSD:

[AvalancheDiode]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

You have a 10% discount coupon?

[[CA]1|Sgt.MG42]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

Yep, the coupon worked. I have to dig up the newsletter if you want it.

FWIW, I don't see SSD prices dropping too rapidly unless Indilinx or Samsung based drives get more competitive with Intel. Price/GB may drop, but JMicron based drives are affordable as it is (but they are utter crap). If you are in the market, I would suggest saving up for an Intel controller based drive at this point. The competition has a bit of catching up to do.

[=98=]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

Wow, that's nice, however I was getting that throughput with a RAID setup. However, i'm sure burst speeds are much, much higher. Be sure to keep the drives firmware up to date.

[[MyIS]Dan]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

Have you enabled advanced performance inside of Windows under the drive properties?

[[CA]1|Sgt.MG42]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

I'm using Win7 almost exclusively because I did not want to spend the time tweaking XP, lining up blocks and all the million other things that needed to be done to get the most out of the SSD. I could not find the option. Where is it located?

[[MyIS]Dan]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

For me, on Vista it is under: Right Click C: > Properties > Hardware > Select disk, Properties > Policies

I found it gave my Raptors in RAID0 a nice boost.

[AvalancheDiode]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

Yep, the coupon worked. I have to dig up the newsletter if you want it.

FWIW, I don't see SSD prices dropping too rapidly unless Indilinx or Samsung based drives get more competitive with Intel. Price/GB may drop, but JMicron based drives are affordable as it is (but they are utter crap). If you are in the market, I would suggest saving up for an Intel controller based drive at this point. The competition has a bit of catching up to do.

Older JMicron controllers (JMF602) are indeed crap, but they still work. They simply suck. OCZ and some other companies use two JMF602 with a built-in RAID0 to "kind of" solve that problem. JMicron tried to rush immature products into the market this time. Wait for newer JMF612 to hit the market.

The price of SSD will be slashed in half a year from now on. DRAM companies who got goverment (Korea and Taiwan) bail outs are buying equipment to make flash modules. Newer 32nm process is ramping up and cheap controllers are coming. Most of us will be using SSDs two years from now on.

[[CA]1|Sgt.MG42]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

For me, on Vista it is under: Right Click C: > Properties > Hardware > Select disk, Properties > Policies

I found it gave my Raptors in RAID0 a nice boost.

If you are referring to write caching, it seems to be enabled by default on Win7. Thanks for the tip though, I migrated to Win7 from XP just last week. :)

Older JMicron controllers (JMF602) are indeed crap, but they still work. They simply suck. OCZ and some other companies use two JMF602 with a built-in RAID0 to "kind of" solve that problem. JMicron tried to rush immature products into the market this time. Wait for newer JMF612 to hit the market.

The price of SSD will be slashed in half a year from now on. DRAM companies who got goverment (Korea and Taiwan) bail outs are buying equipment to make flash modules. Newer 32nm process is ramping up and cheap controllers are coming. Most of us will be using SSDs two years from now on.

Speaking of a 32nm process, this seems to be the latest news--> http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/...s-launch-weeks

As for JMicron, I'm not sure if the JMF612 will offer any serious challenge to either Intel or Samsung. It seems like Corsair are running with Samsung (who have been doing this for a long time) instead of Indilinx.

Edit#
-----
Looks like the binning wars on NAND Flash have begun. It won't be too long before we see people tweaking timings/voltages on the chips to get the most bandwidth.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=58546

[[MyIS]Dan]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

If you are referring to write caching, it seems to be enabled by default on Win7. Thanks for the tip though, I migrated to Win7 from XP just last week. :)

Hmm, I aint played in Win7 enough, but this is the setting in Vista; [media]http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w66/500dan500/PC/drivesettings.png[/media]

[AlecJ32]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

For me, on Vista it is under: Right Click C: > Properties > Hardware > Select disk, Properties > Policies

I found it gave my Raptors in RAID0 a nice boost.

I seriously hope you have a good battery back-up if you're going to be using that feature on a RAID0 configuration.

[[CA]1|Sgt.MG42]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

How does the feature work? What does it do? Is it supposed to be some kind of a hybrid c0 state sleep mode?

[AlecJ32]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

How does the feature work? What does it do? Is it supposed to be some kind of a hybrid c0 state sleep mode?

Advanced Performance is essentially just an 'advanced' version of Write Caching, and does roughly the same thing only much more aggressively.

On a drive with a lot of cache or a RAID array, this feature can give you a pretty good boost of performance, however, it leaves a lot of potential for data loss as well if the machine loses power.

The cache memory used in storage devices is volatile memory, much like RAM. IIRC, it works the same way RAM works, and if so then it's made up of many capacitors. Each capacitor represents one bit of data (there are 8 bits in a byte), and if the capacitor holds a charge it represents a 1, and if it doesn't it represents an 0. Since the cache memory works in this fashion, if the memory doesn't have power it can't store data.

If there's data being written to the cache when your machine loses power, that data will be lost.

[[MyIS]Dan]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

I seriously hope you have a good battery back-up if you're going to be using that feature on a RAID0 configuration.

Nope. :)

I have two weekly back ups going on.

[[CA]1|Sgt.MG42]

Re: [Info] My Intel X25-M SSD

Thanks for the info guys. Looks like many answers can be found HERE