Windows 7: Intel X25-M 120GB SSD Released with Lower Holiday Price

Quote:

Eager to truly make a mark on the NAND Flash storage market, Intel has just a short time ago revealed that its SSDs would be sold at a special holiday price and that its series of such devices has also grown with the addition of one new member.

The new SSD that the Santa Clara, California-based company has delivered is and X25-M drive with a capacity of 120 GB.

It is built out of 34nm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips and boasts, as one would expect, the 2.5-inch form factor.

Needless to say, Intel's own SSD controller is employed while the means of connecting to the rest of the PC is the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface.

Thanks to this combination of technologies, the newcomer can read data at 250 MB/s and write it at 70 MB/s.

The drive has a price of $249 so, in Intel's own words, it “offers the best dollar-per-GB value in the Intel X25-M SSD line.”

Its maker even decided to cut down the prices of its 80 GB and 160 GB solid state drives. The former now goes for $199 while the latter has a suggested retail price of $415.

“Every Christmas, consumers are looking for the latest tech gadget; this year, with prices dropping, the solid-state drive is becoming more mainstream and can make the single greatest improvement to PC performance,” said Troy Winslow, director of product marketing for the Intel NAND Solutions Group.

“With an SSD, tech shoppers can give the gift of a technology makeover that will help speed up, or breathe new life, into a current PC by just swapping out the hard drive for an SSD,” Winslow added.

It should probably be noted that Intel also has a 40 GB “boot drive” on sale, for a suggested resell price of $99.

Source



On sale now.

Id be interested to know its speed compared with the OCZ vertex 2E Ive just bought which is 285mb/s.

It's the same as the current G2's, X25-M160GB read 250 MB/s and write 70 100 MB/s. Newegg says the write is 100MB/s but they have been wrong before.

Edit:
Turns out they were right, 100MB/s write speed from Intel, same as the 160GB.

So no change there, reported rumors have the G3's only a little faster.
They won't catch OCZ at this rate, maybe they're going after lower price (obviously not yet).

Have been reading some dissention on the OCZ forum about actual performance and slightly optimistic published numbers.

Random read and write numbers are much more important than sequential, also Input/Output rates and access times are very important.

I'm not saying Intels are better, reviewers like AnandTech rate SF OCZ higher than Intel on most of their tests.

The interesting thing will be the pricing of the G3s.
OCZ has aggressive pricing and the others are starting to follow, which is a good thing.

Focusing solely on raw sequential throughput just doesn't tell the whole story. That's the problem. Gotta take the drive as a whole, tested in a variety of scenarios to determine which is really the faster drive.

Looks like the X25 M 120GB has the same specs as the 160GB.

Which makes it a bit more attractive.

It's also less $/GB than the Intel 80 and 160GB versions.

Intel® X25-M and X18-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drives Overview

"Low" is a relative price, as a High-school student who works at bestbuy and mows lawns.. sorry - too high

Benchmarks SSD Charts 2010

Darn, I just got the 160Gig and paid close to $395.00.

Ken

Absolutely agree. For smaller drives dedicated to the OS, access time is the name of the game. Fast read/write speeds are nice to have but play only a minor role for the OS performance.
Now that changes as the drives get bigger (e.g. 250GBs) which are used to shove a lot of data around. There the read/write speeds will get a greater importance - and so does Trim support.

+1 pparks1 and whs.


Thanks for the link FliGi7, I somehow managed to miss that very informative benchmark site.
Not to mention that it's very flattering for my little X25 V as far as the benchmarks I consider to be most important.


ken9122, I'll bet you're not alone on this.
I think this SSD will be very popular due to the size and specs.