Intel X25-M

If I decided to build a new computer using the Intel X25-M as my boot drive and my CoH/CoV install drive, would I have performance problems? (I would obviously have a larger drive for other installs and storage).

I've read some stuff about SSD drives having problems with small reads and small writes, but this drive appears to be in a class by itself. Does anyone have any insight into using a drive like this?

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Make a man a fire and keep him warm for the day, SET a man on fire and keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Incarnates: K'lir(Fire/Dark Corr):Hot-House Flower(Plant/Fire Dom):Kinrad X(Kin/Rad Def):Itsy-Bitsy Spider(Crab):Two Ton Tony(Mace/WP Broot):Teeny Weeny Widow(Fortunata/Widow) : Zeroth Law (Ice/Fire Tank)

Benchmarks for SSD have been generally disappointing except for a few models, the Intel being one of them, even then its only about 20% faster than a much cheaper fast HDD which could cost 1/3 the amount you plan to spend.

Everyone makes their own decisions about these kinds of things but I generally council against a purchase that has 300% the cost and only gains 20% performance.

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To be honest, most of the time I look at benchmark reports they seem like they're written in greek. My hope was that I would end up with a system that booted MUCH faster and didn't have any degradation in other areas of performance.

If it is going to make only a minor difference in boot, then I may be better off with a 10,000 RPM raptor.

Thanks for the information!

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Make a man a fire and keep him warm for the day, SET a man on fire and keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Incarnates: K'lir(Fire/Dark Corr):Hot-House Flower(Plant/Fire Dom):Kinrad X(Kin/Rad Def):Itsy-Bitsy Spider(Crab):Two Ton Tony(Mace/WP Broot):Teeny Weeny Widow(Fortunata/Widow) : Zeroth Law (Ice/Fire Tank)

While the price of the X25-M has dropped a lot in the last 9 months ($324 for 80GB version at NewEgg), and while it does very, very well on specific types of benchmarks, doesn't significantly improve the everyday user experience. You can get more than 10x the drive space for less than 1/3rd of the money.

Take the money you save and donate it to charity, take your SO out for a nice evening, take the kids to an amusement park, buy some neat little gizmo that would be the envy of all your friends or stick it in the bank for a rainy day. All would be better uses of that money.

SSDs are the future but they're not quite there yet.

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Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components

Tempus unum hominem manet

[ QUOTE ]
To be honest, most of the time I look at benchmark reports they seem like they're written in greek. My hope was that I would end up with a system that booted MUCH faster and didn't have any degradation in other areas of performance.

If it is going to make only a minor difference in boot, then I may be better off with a 10,000 RPM raptor.

Thanks for the information!

[/ QUOTE ]
Two things determine a conventional mechanical hard drive performance.

First how many bits of data that fly under the head per second. This is determined by bit density of the drive platter and how fast the drive spins.

Second, how quickly the drive can position the head to where the data, access time. This is also affected to some degree by how fast the drive spins.

This is why 10,000 RPM Raptor drives usually perform better than ordinary 7,200 RPM drives.

Obviously SSD drives don't spin or have a mechanical head to reposition. This means it's limitations in performance have more to do with the flash chips used, the SSD controller and the SATA 3.0Gb/s interface.

The good news is that SSD drives don't have to worry about conventional file fragmentation hurting performance. Virtually no seek times. However SSD drives suffer another problem that they are just starting to figure out a decent work around for.

While they can write data to unwritten areas of the flash quickly and in small chunks (4KB), writing into an area already written to but marked as deleted take a lot longer because Flash chips can only erase data in large chunks (512KB). So the SSD has to read all the non erased data first, cache it, erase the entire chunk and write out the cached data before it can write the data chunk you were trying to write out in the first place. On less expensive SSD drives this can seriously affect performance.

This is partially why there was something of a scandal when the Intel X25-M performance was shown to plummet after it was used for a while. Intel had a method that worked very well, up to a point, but then the performance dropped back to what other higher end SSDs had. Now Intel haven't fixed the Flash chips, probably nobody ever will, but Intel did come up with a better way of handling the cache/erase/rewrite problem. Others are starting to as well. Microsoft and SSD manufactures are also talking about including an optimization in the Win 7 file system to help SSD drives in general.

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Father Xmas - Level 50 Ice/Ice Tanker - Victory
$725 and $1350 parts lists --- My guide to computer components

Tempus unum hominem manet

In other words, read and write speeds are what it's all about. SSD still can't write at the speed it needs to to be competitive in the home/enthusiest market for the price points they are currently at.

...but I'm probably wrong. =P

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Thanks so much for the break down Father Xmas, much obliged!

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Make a man a fire and keep him warm for the day, SET a man on fire and keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Incarnates: K'lir(Fire/Dark Corr):Hot-House Flower(Plant/Fire Dom):Kinrad X(Kin/Rad Def):Itsy-Bitsy Spider(Crab):Two Ton Tony(Mace/WP Broot):Teeny Weeny Widow(Fortunata/Widow) : Zeroth Law (Ice/Fire Tank)