Intel X25-M Postville 80 GB

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Caractéristiques
Capacity	80
Cache	32
Rotation Speed	N.A.
Size	2.5
Standard	SATA-2

Vincent Lheur
Test date: June 30, 2010

A very practical accessory

The X25-M, a standard 2.5 inch SSD, is sold with a mount for a 3.5 inch bay. This is a very practical accessory when you want to install it in a casing with no 2.5 inch bay... and many fall into this category.

On sale for the last few weeks in a first version, the Intel X25-M is back in its new Postville version, one of the best SSDs in terms of value for money since its appearance on the market. We naturally wanted to run it through its paces.

Available in two versions (80 and 160 GB), this SSD uses an Intel PC29AS21B0 controller and Micron memory chips. The SATA-2 interface supports TRIM, a feature which prevents performance degradation over the course of writes to the drive. TRIM is supported natively in Windows 7. Those who use older versions will still be able to benefit from software available on Intel's site to carry the operation out manually. Intel recommend weekly usage, though every ten days seems ample.

Pure performance

Once we got hold of the drive its performance levels were such that we had to rejig our ratings scale and mark down various values. This is why the ratings of the recently tested OCZ, Kingston, and Integral SSDs have been reduced. They're a long way behind the Intel X25-M:

Performances with CrystalDiskMark over 4 GB.

The AS-SSD results confirm those of CrystalDiskMark. The only notable difference comes in terms of the NCZ test where AS-SSD uses a queue of 64 requests against 32 for CrystalDiskMark:

Performances measured with AS-SSD.

Access times are pretty much the same and won't impact on performance:

Access times with AS-SSD.

Performance in practice

Going on to the applied tests with PCMark Vantage, the scores literaly blow the standard magnetic hard drives and entry-level SSDs out of the water. With an overall index of 32733, it gives almost 6 times what you get on the celebrated on WD VelociRaptor:

Looking at an even more practical test, we also measured the start-up time with Windows 7 as well as installation of the Crysis demo and Office Pro 2007 (the source files are on the drive to be tested as well as the destination):