Intel X25-V 40 GB

The Intel X25-V is the poor relation of the X25-M. The V stands for "Value". It's limited to 40 GB of storage, against 80 GB and 160 GB for the X25-M. It is of course also priced much more accessibly.

This doesn't mean that its spec is any the less mouthwatering however, as it retains some of the spec of the X-25M including TRIM support, the excellent PC29AS21BA0 controller and 32 MB of cache.

Pure performance:

The first test with CrystalDiskMark places it very close to the X25-M in terms of read speeds, with an excellent score:
 

CrystalDiskMark

Writes are however limited to around 44 MB/s. The good news is that this is practically constant whatever the type of file. Small and large files are scored at 38 MB/s and 44 MB/s respectively. The X25-V is therefore pretty mediocre with large files but excellent with small ones. And this is better than the other way round because current SSD capacity limits them to serving as main hard drives to house the operating system and software and not data such as photos and video.

The AS-SSD tests confirm the results with CrystalDiskMark:
 

AS-SSD

Access times are identical to those for the X25-M:
 

Access times with AS-SSD

Performance in practice:

As we were saying before, the X25-V's excellent handling of small files gives it a very good score with PCMark Vantage:
 

Except for just a few small differences, the X25-V gives similar speeds to the X25-M. The 'V' therefore gives excellent usage across most software, limiting any lack of availability of the OS.

Additional tests show that the X25-V is a little behind the X25-M during installation of Crysis. On the two other tests the two SSDs remain equivalent: