Intel ships super-svelte SSD
40GB only and slugged performance
Intel is now shipping a cut-down version of its X25-M SSD for less than $150, days after OCZ announced its sub-$100 Onyx SSD.
The X25-V, presaged in November last year has just 40GB of multi-level cell capacity, half the entry-level X25-M's 80GB. It's a boot drive SSD with the performance skewed enormously to reading rather than writing.
The sustained write bandwidth is up to a poor 35MB/sec while sustained reads can relatively tear along at up to 170MB/sec.
The random 4KB figures are even more extreme; up to 25,000 read IOPS but only up to a niggardly 2,500 write IOPS.
The Onyx figures are less skewed to reading: read speed being up to 125MB/sec with writes at up to 70MB/sec. If all you want is a boot and app load drives then the Intel one performs better.
In comparison the 80GB X25-M will do sustained reading at up to 250MB/sec and writes at up to 70MB/sec.
The X25-V is built on Intel/Micron's 34nm process, has support for the Windows 7 TRIM functionality and comes in the standard 2.5-inch form factor. It has a 1.2 million hours mean time before failure rating.
It can be bought for $130 on Newegg, or around £79 in the UK. That's more expensive than the 32GB Onyx. It's also more expensive on a per-GB basis than the 80GB X25-M, available for $225 on Newegg, meaning $2.81/GB versus the X25-V's $3.25/GB.
The X25-V's capacity and performance have both been cut compared to the X25-M, but its relative price is higher. ®
COMMENTS
There is no such thing!
Cool geeks do not exist. Cool hardware, on the other hand, abounds :)
Got one
Fitted it to replace a failed WD Velociraptor in a CAD workstation - faster, silent and Windows 7 loads in seconds. (also fitted a 500GB HDD for everything apart from the OS).
@Brutus
Cool geeks exist. As my example of someone who is a total nerd, complete dork, geek of fame and quite possibly one of the coolest mofos on the entire planet:
The dude who writes XKCD.
(Yes, I know it was a troll, but I could not resist. Everyone wants to be awesome enough to do something like XKCD.)
Like it
I'm not interested pounds per gb. I just want a good quality ssd with a low unit price. This could be it if we don't get shafted in the exchange rate.
The most IOPS for your buck!
According to some really cool hardware geeks I know, these are the disks to get if you're looking for the most IOPS for your buck for a smaller server or other home computer.
With three of these disks in RAID-0 on a ICH10R or better controller, you could get upwards of 90.000 IOPS / second read and 30.000 IOPS / write perfomance. *Not MY numbers.
The recommended chunk size is 16 to 128, but 128 is the overall best performing size to go for, unless you could benefit from smaller sizes due to very specific purposes.
