Intel's First SSD Blows Doors Off Competition

theraindog writes "Intel is entering the storage market with an ambitious X25-M solid-state drive capable of 250MB/s sustained reads and 70MB/s writes. The drive is so fast that it employs Native Command Queuing (originally designed to hide mechanical hard drive latency) to compensate for latency the SSD encounters in host systems. But how fast is the drive in the real world? The Tech Report has an in-depth review comparing the X25-M's performance and power consumption with that of the fastest desktop, mobile, and solid-state drives on the market."

Comments

More Details and Benchmarks Here

[Anonymous Coward]

This article at HotHardware, has a few additional tests that show real-world usage models as well as synthetic benchmarks: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80GB-SATA-Solid-State-Drive-Intel-Ups-The-Ante/

The PCMark Vantage tests are especially impressive: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80GB-SATA-Solid-State-Drive-Intel-Ups-The-Ante/?page=7

Re:One test they never run - FRAGMENTATION

[chill]

Yes, it would wear the disk out faster, but your original premise is flawed.

Clustering locations would allow for accessing large chunks of data with one fetch, instead of lots of little fetches. If you're old enough, think back to the Blitter on the Amiga and moving contiguous chunks of memory as opposed fragmented blocks.

Remember, RAM can get fragmented just as badly as a hard drive.