Intel's fastest SSD just got furious - and bloody expensive!.
Okay, first off, and before you read any more of this review check out the price, and the capacity. You'll probably see an eight hundred, and a thirty-two, and you'd not be wrong - this is $25 for every gigabyte of storage you pay for this drive. What makes it worth it? does anything actually make it worth that huge pricetag? Well, just maybe.
This is a Solid State Drive, essentially a glorified USB stick with incredibly fast memory chips inside. They're laid out in rows, and the form factor of the drive is the standard 2.5 inches wide. It weighs about as much as your average MP3 player (not much at all), makes no noise while running, and doesn't have any moving parts in it at all - meaning you don't have to wait for platters to start spinning or heads to move to get your data.
The drive performs admirably - being made with Single-Level Cell flash gives it inherently sweet performance. This means that a single bit will be stored in each cell of the memory, as opposed to multiple bits, improving performance. We got an average read speed of 229.4MB/s, a maximum of 257.9MB/s and an access time of only 0.1ms. What this equates to in HDD terms is the speed of a Velociraptor twice over again; and then some more performance on the top!
Sadly, being only 32GB means that you'll either have only the OS on it (perhaps one game) or just your games, and there isn't a phenomenal amount of space here. If you need the speed however, this is the cream of the crop.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012