Intel x25-M Sata Solid-State Drives

Well first let me say that I am pretty skeptical when it comes to a company launching any product that is supposed to make a huge difference for gamers and many times I am not willing to spend the money to take a chance. Most reviews on hardware are done with all numbers and you know that great numbers give you the data to make an educated decision on whether a product is good or it’s not but in reality how is that going to help my in game performance? We are going to be reviewing hardware from our perspective (The Gamer). While numbers are great I want to know how hardware will help me perform to my best when I am in game. So with our first review I bring you the Intel X25-M Solid State Drive otherwise known as the SSD.

Let me start by explaining to you a little about the “said” benefits of a SSD:

• Faster start up. On a regular hard
drive the disk has to spin up to get started and thus take longer to get up tospeed. You can think of it like the old record players and starting it with the needle on the record the music starts off really slow then builds up to speed.
• Faster Random Access – This means that your current disk has to search your drive for the files it needs and the more you have on your drive the longer that takes (loading time)
• No Defragmentation – No more defrag before a match? Seriously these drives actually tell you to turn defrag off. I know before any big matches for years I have always defragged my hard drive and restarted my computer.
• Less Moving parts – Regular hard drives are mechanical drives and a SSD is not. Anyone knows the less moving parts the less chance for something to break.
• Reduced Power – Meaning you can hook up one more accessories before you blow the breaker.

Now let’s talk about what happens in the real world. Every gamer wants the ultimate gaming computer and some are willing to spend all the money necessary to make that happen. One of the main and always overlooked issues is the hard drive. I hear about guys buying huge graphics cards and power supplies and true these all help but you have to think about where your game is stored and how quickly accessing that information is key to delivering the game as quick as you need it. In my testing I always start with the basics. New install of windows this is always a good test of the hard drive to see how long it takes to install it. Installing windows 7 x64 with the drive took 14 minutes and 20 seconds including system restarts. I have to say that with this initial test I was more than impressed. Given that some of this time is dependent on your cd rom speed all you can do is test it vs another hard drive and after 30 minutes of waiting on the Raptor to install windows I decided to move on. Ok you have me intrigued. My next test was to install all my drivers and get windows 7 updated I wanted everything
up to date so that I could test my windows ratings in Windows 7. In my ratings my bottleneck is always my hard drive normally they rate in the low 6’s and my other hardware is low to mid 7’s. Look at these test results 7.1? Need I say more? Ok you got me interested.

For my next test I wanted to download a few games and see how long it would take to install them. So I downloaded the game and saved it to my desktop. Once it was on the desktop I was only depending on the hard drive for speed. One thing to keep in mind is that every game is packed differently so the only indicator you can use this test for is how quickly it installs that particular game. However it’s important that when I am ready to play a game that I don’t want to waste time I am ready to play. Here are the following games and there install times:

Combat Arms: 2.78 GB – 29.1
Seconds
CrossFire: 1.7 GB – 1:15.8 Seconds

Ok now I am getting excited. At this point I am trying to figure out all the places I could be saving time but there is one more test to take and that’s how does it perform ingame. While I don’t have hard data for you from in game what I can tell you are that the improvements I see cannot be expressed in a mere review. I can tell you all the great new experiences you will have and that this is the answer to your prayers but at the end of the day you will never know until you try it. In my words and for all those who know me realize that I pretty much say what I
think I am done with regular hard drives except for storage. There is no reason in the world if you are a gamer that you are not playing on an SSD. These drives are by far better than anything I have ever used. Intel has hit a homerun here with SSD.

On the second part of my test I wanted to test a Raid-0 set-up and run it against my existing Raid-0 and see what type of differences there were. So for testing I am running 2 – Intel X25-M SSDs vs. 2 – Western Digital Black Hard Drives. This should be a typical type of set-up for most gamers who need fast response and storage capacity. First we will start by looking at what Windows rates both drives at: