Intel 80 GB X25M Mainstream SATA II Solid State Drive SSD Retail Package SSDSA2MH080G2R5 buy online
Band : Intel
Model : SSDSA2MH080G2R5
Product Features :
- With no moving parts Intel SSDs offer a quiet storage solution that responds quickly and uses less power
>> Nice but you have to consider some short comings
First you will get 74 gig not 80 Also you cannot run a Raid consisting of an ssd and a regular Hdd The boot up time using just this ssd is about 46 seconds win7 64 bit ultimate You can use this ssd with a regular HDD as storage remember not in Raid but your boot up time goes up to 98 seconds In Bios make sure you choose AHCI for SATA and also make sure you connect the SATA connection for this drive to either port 0 or 1 not any other port otherwise your motherboard will not find it This drive is very small even thiner than a tic tac box and it does not even get warm If you really want to experience the fast speed put two of these in Raid 0 don t use regular HDD then and you will see the difference Overall it is a good drive for now I am sure a couple of years from now it will be obsolete because much better drives are on the way Finally don t forget to turn off the auto defragmentation in Windows It ruins the drive if it is on
>> Still One Of The Best SSDs
The odd Mac owner s gripes notwithstanding for the other 95 of the planet that runs Windows especially Win 7 this thing rocks I ve got several of them now and have had zero problems Despite lots of heavy use they re still as fast as they day I installed them something that can t be said for all the countless drives that don t properly support TRIM or have manufacture supplied utilities to clean them up
I bought one of my X25M s to replace a Corsair Extreme SSD that had slowed WAY down with just a few month s use Corsair has been promising proper TRIM support for close to a year and still hasn t delivered an update that works This Intel drive however beats the Corsair by any measure and is fully supported by Intel with useful utilities real TRIM support user firmware upgrades etc There s no contest Corsair should stick to RAM
The boot time for Windows drops by more than half with this drive compared to even the fastest 7200 RPM conventional drive That s especially true in notebook with a slow 4200 or 5400 RPM drive I have computers that boot Win 7 in under 10 seconds with this drive Plus they re silent use less power and create less heat all good things especially in a laptop
>> Why I bought THIS drive over other brands
A little bit of research will tell you that it s pretty confusing out there There are so many reviews > and < hardware revisions out there so this was what made me go with the Intel x25M g2 SSD
1 For most of the reviews Intel was always the baseline Rarely did I see for example OCZ and Patriot without some mention or comparison with Intel It was pretty clear who set the standards for SSD drives
2 I have a netbook I was tired of babying my netbook because I had a regular hard drive in it I felt that a SSD would allow me to use my netbook in more situations as well as give me that extra boost in bootspeed so I could use it almost instantly out of sleep mode
3 The new value series x25 V was slower and smaller and I wanted speed portability an atom processor is slow enough and a 40gig drive is too small The next level up were all priced reasonably close but with even the new drives and features Intel was still the baseline of comparison
I did not want to take a chance on possibly being satisfied with a slower drive and I felt more confidant with a company that had already established themselves with SSD drives and were releasing a 2nd generation drive that improved upon what seems to the the industry standard
Setting up the drive seemed intimidating but I figured I would back up and use the restore disc I have a Asus 1000he Swapping the drives out was easy about 2 minutes to do and I know there s plenty of grunt work with partition alignment ect but I just kept it simple and turned off indexing and turned off the page file
It s been great so far Probably would be better if I tweaked everything But I m happy using it as a super sized PDA and not having to worry about syncing or special apps or worrying about the hard drive skipping I use my Netbook twice as much now
