Intel X25-M Reloaded: Generation 2 Cometh (Updated!)

** Updated on 30th September 2009 **

Article has been updated with Iometer and stress testing results, thus a more substantial conclusion to upsize our original preview article to a full review with a rating.

Intel Ups the Stakes with 2nd Generation X25-M SSD

After months of anticipation, Intel's second generation X25-M SSD drives are finally retailing! What's so exciting about these SSD drives you ask? Well, the original X25-M SSD drives have set the benchmark for all drives to follow for the past year with phenomenal performance gains over other standard SSD and hard drives alike. Yes, even against other SSD drives, the Intel X25-M was notably speedier than the competition.

Now with the second generation X25-M drives, these feature flash memory chips manufactured on the 34nm process technology versus the previous 50nm technology. Primarily this brings with it a huge cost savings to produce these drives as Intel gets to make more flash memory out of the same silicon wafer. Now couple cost savings with reduced latency and improved I/O operations per second (IOPS), and Intel probably has another winner on their hands.

In fact, with street prices of these second generation drives going for US$275 and US$499 for the 80GB and 160GB variants respectively, they are quite competitively priced. While the advertised sequential read/writes speeds are still similar to the original X25-M at 250MB/s and 70MB/s respectively, we'll soon find out if the transition to newer flash memory and controller tweaking brought about any notable gains besides lower prices.

Yet another highlight of these new drives is that Intel will release a newer firmware as soon as Windows 7 is launched to support its new drive management features such as the TRIM function to keep the drive well optimized at all times. To-date, Intel has unfortunately not expressed any interest to renew drive feature support on the first generation drives, so the new drives are automatically more appealing.

Before we dive in to check out the performance numbers, how do you differentiation a first generation X-25M SSD with that of the second generation drive when their basic marketing model names are alike? Even the capacities are alike. The answer lies with the complete drive model name. Take for example the first generation 2.5-inch form factor 80GB drives; this has a product name of SSDSA2MH080G1 where as the brand new second generation drive will be known as SSDSA2MH080G2. So check for the "G2" variant when hunting for the new X25-M.

Test Setup

All the hard drives compared in this review, solid state and mechanical, were tested using the following system configuration:

• Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz)
• MSI 975X PowerUp Edition (Intel 975X Express chipset)
• 2GB DDR2-667 RAM
• XpertVision GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB (ForceWare 186.18)
• Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Pack 1
• 
  

You might have reservations on our choice of an older generation system, but we have done internal testing to ascertain that there are no notable differences even when testing was done on the latest Core i7 based system. Surprising, but it's true from our tests that the latest ICH10R Southbridge wasn't able to outclass the Core 2 system's controller. Take note that the Intel 975X Express chipset uses an ICH7R Southbridge which supports SATA 3Gbp/s standards and hence has the minimum requirements covered.

The following are the firmware versions used for the various SSDs at the time of testing:

• Intel X25-M Gen.2 (160GB) - version 2CV102G9
• Intel X25-M - version 8820
• Kingston SSDNow E Series - version 8850
• Mtron PRO 7500 - version 0.20R1
• OCZ Vertex - version 1.3.0
• Patriot Torqx - version 1571
• 
  

We've recently updated the scores for almost all the SSD drives we've last compared as new firmware have been launched. Additionally, firmware such as those from Intel that does not erase the entire drive was further erased securely with the HDDErase 4.0 utility.

As a baseline of sorts, we've results for two mechanical hard drives in our comparison. The first is Western Digital's (WD) well-known 10,000RPM drive, the speedy WD VelociRaptor (WD3000GLFS) to represent the high-end enthusiast offering for storage and a 1TB 7200RPM WD Caviar Black (WD1001FALS) with a 32MB cache to stand in for an example of a typical hard drive currently.

Benchmarks List

• CrystalMark 2004R3
• SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP3c
• PCMark Vantage
• HD Tune Pro 3.5
• Iometer (version 2006.07.27)

Results - CrystalMark 2004R3 and SiSoft Sandra 2009 SP3c

As CrystalMark's overall score nicely summarized the breakdown, the new Intel X25-M SSD is just a tad better than the already well positioned original X25-M unit. Focusing on the breakdown, it is evident that the Intel X25-M drives are highly optimized for read performance for consumer usage needs whereas the enterprise drives like the Kingston, offer solid write performance results. A good point to note here is that the new Intel X25-M has improved its sequential write performance by a small margin. On the other hand, the OCZ and Patriot drives come in as decent competitors offering a balanced mix between both extremities.

Results - PCMark Vantage

Next we used PCMark Vantage to find out how these drives fared in real-world scenarios by focusing on the hard drive test suite. These tests range from gaming performance, to loading applications and media creation performance - all in all, testing a mix of read/write performance whose blend varies in each of the test scenarios.

If you thought the original X25-M was doing swell in these real-world scenarios, the newer and more refined second generation X25-M unit outdoes its earlier sibling and its enterprise variant too. This presumably hints that the PCMark Vantage tests have more read-based routines than write-based ones. And indeed you can see that the new drive does really well in all the read-heavy tasks like loading applications, Windows Startup and Windows Defender scanning. Even in tests where write-related tasks coming heavy, the new drive has shown marked improvements over its predecessor. So far, the new drive seems to be in a positive light.

Results - HD Tune Pro 3.5

Tuning in to HD Tune's results where we got a better handle on the SSD's various performance aspects, the sequential read results were chart-topping just as we found from our initial set of benchmarks from Sisoft and CrystalMark. Sequential write performance however wasn't its forte unlike the Kingston enterprise drive. But the important point is that it's still better than its predecessor and is plenty fast enough from a single user perspective.

Lastly, we cast our attention on the random read/write performance of the drive. Reads were spectacular and the new Intel X25-M has set a new benchmark for others to follow. Write performance was to be expected for its caliber so we won't be nitpicking about it. Again both the Indilinix controller based drives (OCZ and Patriot) offer a more balanced IOPS for read/write performance, so it really depends on how you intend to set up your next system to capitalize on the drive you've set out to get.

Results - Iometer (Part 1)

As usual, we put all these drives through the grind of Iometer, with different workloads and different I/O queue depth. We have chosen to show results from queue depth range from 1 to 5 so as to simulate the typical scenario faced by typical consumers. Going into deeper depths are better suited for very high transactional workloads, which is not typical of the target group.

Examining the 64k streaming read and write performance, the new Intel drive came out just as expected, and is more or less on par with its predecessor - best in class read performance and average write performance (hampered only because of Intel's restriction set for the consumer drive).

Surprisingly, the file server workload fared better on the first generation X25-M drive than the G2 edition, but the drive caught up as we ramped up the workload. Web server performance however was chart topping, beating even the Kingston enterprise drive based on Intel's SLC class drives.

Results - Iometer (Part 2)

Next we examined the I/O response time for the same workloads as the previous page. Response times was streaming read/write performance returned some of the better results and was all good. Note that the Indilinix controller based drives don't respond well on their write response times which naturally dragged their streaming write performance as well as the file server

profile test.

Continuing on with response times for both file server and web server profiles, the new Intel X25-M handled it rather well as well. The mechanical had drives are showing their technology difference in these tests.

Performance after Stress Testing

A common question that has been raised time and time again is how much performance users stand to lose after frequent usage of their SSD - especially considering older drives that don't yet have any self trimming or self healing features. While the new Gen.2 Intel X25-M drives such as this unit in review supports this function, it won't be effective till a newer firmware is released and that should be as soon as Windows 7 is released. The new OS will support a storage controller addressing enhancement called TRIM which will pre-erase the block holding data needing deletion. We'll touch more on how this works in an upcoming article. In any case, we took this opportunity to show you what kind of performance you can expect to get out of this drive after extended usage without self trimming features active or without securely erasing the drive completely from time to time.

Given the torturous testing we put the SSD drives in our testing phase where we run an extended phase of Iometer testing, we figure that's more than adequate to get all the flash cells used up at least once - thus artificially invoking a heavily used state of the drive. For the larger 160GB drive capacity we're testing in this review, this required us to run our test suite at least thrice before we saturated all the flash cells. Instead of running through all the test results, we focus upon HD Tune, one of the more sensitive benchmarks that's able to relay the outcome.

First up is the sequential read test where we compare the performance before and after the stress test. As seen in the snapshot comparisons below, there was minimal impact and it's to be expected as that's the nature of SSD drives always offering excellent read performance (254.2MB/s versus 238.2MB/s average transfer rate).

Write performance is what you should be most concerned about since this is where the drive needs to perform a lot more operations just to delete pre-occupied flash cells before writing new data. We'll talk about the details of these operations and why the performance loss in a dedicated article soon, but for now, just know that the write performance gets hit most after the drive is heavily used. Comparing the average sequential read performance, this drive loses more than 65% performance. That's quite a big drop in performance, but it's not alone; other drives based on the Indilinx controller such as the OCZ Vertex and Patriot Torqx fare just as worst in their state.

More importantly, you probably should be concerned of the random write performance which suffers even worse. The graphs below the following snapshot focus on random block transfer size testing and you can see that the Intel X25-M drives take quite a fall here. What's worse for Intel is that there's no tool to restore its performance without a complete secure erase (which means losing all your data in the process). Indilinix controller based drives are a lot luckier is this aspect since they've got a Wiper utility to rely upon which can restores performance without losing the drive contents.

However, once Windows 7 comes around and all these drives have firmware level support for TRIM command support, all of these concerns would be moot and we needn't even bother testing for 'used' state performance. However till then and till you make the Windows 7 switch, our testing should come in handy for your consideration.

Conclusion

What can we say? The new second generation Intel X25-M drives showcased excellent performance in a number of our tests. Granted write performance is still capped by Intel, for most typical consumers, the average write performance shouldn't be much of a cause for concern as it's at least as fast as the best mechanical hard drives. More hardcore enthusiasts who know their usage profile and require far better writer performance would probably be better off with the Indilinix-controller based drives from OCZ and Vertex, or better yet, invest in an enterprise hard drive using SLC flash memory. Yet another option is to run a RAID-0 setup of the Intel X25-M drives which should give you even more phenomenal read results and much improved write performance too.

Probably the only concern for the moment is the drive's write performance once it has been heavily used, exhausting all free flash memory cells. However as we've mentioned, it's only of concern for the moment and once the new firmware supporting the TRIM command as well as Windows 7 is out, these concerns should be a thing of the past. Alternatively for those who're not making the switch yet, a secure erase of the drive will restore performance back to normal. This however means losing existing data on the drive and would require a thorough backup on your part.

For the typical upgrader and enthusiast stepping up to the SSD world who would be relegating the SSD mostly for OS and application installation, leaving your data, system virtual memory and pagefile usage to your much larger capacity standard hard drives, the new Intel X25-M is probably the best consumer hard drive out there at the moment. It has outstanding read performance which is typically required for most users more than strong write performance. Coupled with the new price points of US$275 and US$499 for the 80GB and 160GB variants respectively, we wholeheartedly recommend this new stallion for your new system or rejuvenating your existing rig.

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