Intel X25-M Solid State Drive

The fastest Solid State Drive we've seen.

Intel is not a name that you immediately think of when talking about storage, but anyone who’s anyone knows the big chip-making giant. With the CPU market tucked firmly in its belt, can Intel also grab hold of the high-performance storage market?

Intel’s X25-M SSD is in the traditional 2.5in laptop form factor, and uses the standard SATA power and data cables that most hard drives use today. It’s about one centimeter thick, and about one and a third the size of a business card. In other words – bloody small. There isn’t a lot of weight in the SSD either, feeling more like a few USB sticks rather than a larger drive – probably because they share so much in common.

Intel has developed a special type of NAND just for this product. Made on a 50nm manufacturing process (only 5nm larger than their current CPUs), this allows 80GB of memory chips to be placed in this small form factor. While only 74.5GB of this space is actually usable once the drive has been formatted, this is still plenty of room for an Operating System and some games.

But it’s not the space that you’d buy this for – it’s the speed. We recorded an average speed of 228.3MB/s – twice that of the WD Velociraptor’s average of 110. The speed hit a ceiling at a blistering 261.93MB/s, with access times at a certifiably insane 0.1ms. With no platters to spin up, this drive can practically work at the speed of electricity (though there is some overhead from the components communicating with each other).

We found that under use, there was simply no wait for the drive. Folders with hundreds of files opened instantly, each name loaded. The dreaded Vista photo viewer that usually takes ten seconds to load anything popped up in less than a second, and we were able to flick through photos without having to wait at all. Even our games loaded appreciably faster, with a few seconds shaved off the loading times – think of all the time you’ll save if you game often!

The drive didn’t get hot under load, nor did it make any noise at all. It did warm up, but only to the level that a USB stick would – we were too disturbed at the lack of whirring platters to notice.

If you’re serious about performance, and want the absolute best you can buy right now, the X25-M is definitely the drive to get – if you can afford it.