Conclusion
If you took the time to flip through all of the benchmark pages, then you probably won’t need to read this conclusion to know what we're going to say. Intel’s first SSD, the X25-M, which aims at the premium desktop and mobile market, was already impressive. It still dominates many benchmarks, pairing high performance with great efficiency. But the X25-E is something different altogether.
Performance Madness
The new device is based on the same controller and cache memory architecture. It does not provide more maximum throughput than the X25-M (200 MB/s), and it is limited to 32 GB and 64 GB capacities for now. But it offers serious write performance (160 MB/s) thanks to single level cell flash memory, which the mainstream drive doesn’t possess. More importantly, it introduces I/O performance that is 10x to 25x higher than what you can get from the latest 15,000 RPM server hard drives. In almost every I/O benchmark, except the Web server test, the X25-E is three to five times faster than its direct flash SSD competitors.
Revealing the Inefficient
Describing the X25-E as the most efficient server drive would be correct, but I prefer to endorse it as the flash SSD storage product that finally redefines server storage performance, and resets the standards for high I/O devices. It isn’t so much more efficient than hard drives, but hard drives are simply extremely inefficient when it comes to random workloads.
Sophisticated flash memory technology has reached a level at which a single storage product is capable of delivering performance levels formerly reached only on complex RAID arrays with 6-12 hard drives. Not only does it outperform those good old hard drives, but this single X25-E storage product does it while consuming only a bit more than 1 W, on average, compared to at least 100 W for a RAID array.
This doesn’t mean that the hard drive is going to disappear, of course. High capacity applications and fast throughput remain an undisputed domain of magnetic storage products. But the days of hard drives being used in I/O intensive server applications are numbered. Hitachi and Seagate had better do their homework before releasing their flash SSD products in late 2009 or 2010, as Intel has set the bar higher than it has ever been before in the server storage market.
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So just how long till desktop enthusiasts see "reasonable" (~$150) prices for these drives?
2 years ago when the SSD hype started, they said "2 years" until this hits the mainstream market. People back then thought flash memory would be faster, have quicker access times, energy efficient, big and CHEAP. SSDs until the X25 series turned out to be neither. And with less than 10ct/GB HDD will no be beaten that quickly.
I'd say, 2 year until this hits the mainstream market. ;-)
can somebody please explain the difference between the poor file server performance of the x-25M compared to the rather good performance on the webserver. Is it to do with the size of the files being read or doing reads and writes at the same time? Considering that most production enviroments for web and file servers consist of about 90% reads and 10% writes on average, do the benchmarks above reflect this?
If I could justify the cost I would shoehorn two of these baby's into my laptop immediately!
I would love to see what four of these in a striped and mirrored RAID array could do...
Although this comparison of Intels X25 was nice to see against cheeter HD 15,000rmp drives & the Samsung,
Can someone please tell me why Toms hardware are still avoiding putting the Intel X25 up against the OCZ Vertex & OCZ Apex series in these bench mark tests ?, or are they afraid that the new OCZs SSDs might beat the X25 !.
Again this is just another fixed bench test to me where the Intel as been matched up against some no hope contenders.
Maybe this test was done by the boxing promoter DON KING, < he was a dodgy fixer of matchers.
Unicomplex, its probably because the OCZ drives are a load of toss
has OCZ got their bottlenecking issues sorted out yet ? or are they still relying on the people on their forum to provide workarounds such as formatting in 4kb chucks/stripes and formatting allignment to overcome piss poor component selection ? Intel has proved, good quality components can make or break a drive, sure you pay through the nose.... but you also dont end up with a lot of pissed off customers, OCZ's customer service on $500+ units is dreadful