Well my 80GB X25-M has come and I have installed the beauty. I had quite high expectations from what I had read, and the drive has not disappointed. 
When I first received the package the first thing I noticed was how light the box was. It was almost disconcerting - as if it was empty!
I opened her up to find what I can only describe as quite a cute little (very little) drive. I expected it to be small, but not diminutive! To give you an indication of the size:
The X25 next to a medium apple:
The X25 on top of my 'old' Maxtor DiamondMax 22 500GB:
I tried to orient it in several different positions when I was mounting it, but it was so small that I seemed unable to do this successfully. I rather unceremoniously placed it on top of the hard drive cage (a few inches below the DVD RAM drive) secured into place somewhat by cables that were pushing on it. Given the resiliance and durability of the drives this didn't really worry me - and with a "My SSD Rocks" sticker on the side of the case, what could possibly go wrong?
Installing Windows 7
The first thing I did after powering on my system was to go into the BIOS and check the drive was detected. I then changed the RAID mode from IDE to AHCI and restarted the system, with Windows 7 in the DVD drive. The first few steps of the installation were obviously somewhat restricted by the speed of my DVD drive - but after a few minutes the X25 could really strut its stuff, and strut it did! The entire installation must've lasted around 6 minutes, which as a long time Windows and regular HDD user I found very impressive.
Updating Windows 7 and installing drivers
The whole process of installing Windows 7 updates is a lot less painful on the X25. After they have downloaded, the installation is very zippy and even update configuration after a restart is very rapid. The same can be said for driver installation, or anything else that you've downloaded for that matter. My Xonar sound drivers, Catalyst Control centre and drivers and Logitech keyboard and mouse drivers could all be installed in a couple of minutes. This compares favourably to my old hard drive, which may have taken this long to half install my sound drivers alone.
General usage
The general reponsiveness of my system has been greatly improved by my X25. Just opening programs like Internet Explorer, Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Media Player is as good as instant. I found that it could be quite a quick process with my old hard drive, but it was never this fast or this consistently fast. Navigating through images and audio files is also much better now - images open and change instantly and audio files start playing before my finger has even left the mouse.
The whole system starts up and restarts extremely quickly now as well, which is awesome. The overall speed at which it restarts and installs things makes installing new drivers and programs that require restarts a hell of a lot quicker!
Some speed comparisons
Well I'm sure you're all dying to see the numbers. I ran the AS SSD Benchmark on my Maxtor DiamondMax 22, which was a replacement for my totally broken WDC Caviar SE I was using until recently. I almost gave up and just scrapped it, but I persisted; you'll see why I wanted to stop it though:
And my X25-M showed marginal improvements
:
Gaming usage
Unfortunately I haven't really had a chance to test this aspect of the drive much. My early testing on this front has been very positive, though. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising has some pretty detailed missions which used to take a fair bit of time to load. Now, on single player COOP, you definitely get into the action a bit more quickly. Although anybody who has played the game will know that even an SSD can't stop you having to walk several Klicks on some of the missions.
I have found, unsurprisingly, that game of the moment Battlefield Bad Company 2 still loads as slowly as ever on multiplayer. I hear this is an ATI issue though, so I'm not too concerned. I never really noticed any stuttering on these games, but I would be tempted to suggest that the minimum framerate is a bit better now - this is especially noticeable if you enable Vsync. It could partly be down to the new graphics driver, but the overall experience is very smooth.
Conclusion
After my fairly limited time using the drive, I have already got my computer back to a similar (actually better) state driver and essential program wise. The process of doing this (in particular installing Windows updates) has been a lot less painful than usual due to rapid installation and restart speeds. Everything on the OS like navigating about the control panel and system settings, the start menu and opening simple programs like Media Player and Windows Live is much more fluid. I would say that, overall, I am very impressed with the X25-M 80GB. Although I am not in a position to compare it to other SSDs, it has certainly been a worthwhile upgrade from a regular HDD. I also feel reassured that things are less likely to go wrong - but if I do need to start over and reformat, the whole thing won't be such a chore!
When I first received the package the first thing I noticed was how light the box was. It was almost disconcerting - as if it was empty!
I opened her up to find what I can only describe as quite a cute little (very little) drive. I expected it to be small, but not diminutive! To give you an indication of the size:The X25 next to a medium apple:
The X25 on top of my 'old' Maxtor DiamondMax 22 500GB:
I tried to orient it in several different positions when I was mounting it, but it was so small that I seemed unable to do this successfully. I rather unceremoniously placed it on top of the hard drive cage (a few inches below the DVD RAM drive) secured into place somewhat by cables that were pushing on it. Given the resiliance and durability of the drives this didn't really worry me - and with a "My SSD Rocks" sticker on the side of the case, what could possibly go wrong?
Installing Windows 7
The first thing I did after powering on my system was to go into the BIOS and check the drive was detected. I then changed the RAID mode from IDE to AHCI and restarted the system, with Windows 7 in the DVD drive. The first few steps of the installation were obviously somewhat restricted by the speed of my DVD drive - but after a few minutes the X25 could really strut its stuff, and strut it did! The entire installation must've lasted around 6 minutes, which as a long time Windows and regular HDD user I found very impressive.
Updating Windows 7 and installing drivers
The whole process of installing Windows 7 updates is a lot less painful on the X25. After they have downloaded, the installation is very zippy and even update configuration after a restart is very rapid. The same can be said for driver installation, or anything else that you've downloaded for that matter. My Xonar sound drivers, Catalyst Control centre and drivers and Logitech keyboard and mouse drivers could all be installed in a couple of minutes. This compares favourably to my old hard drive, which may have taken this long to half install my sound drivers alone.
General usage
The general reponsiveness of my system has been greatly improved by my X25. Just opening programs like Internet Explorer, Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Media Player is as good as instant. I found that it could be quite a quick process with my old hard drive, but it was never this fast or this consistently fast. Navigating through images and audio files is also much better now - images open and change instantly and audio files start playing before my finger has even left the mouse.
The whole system starts up and restarts extremely quickly now as well, which is awesome. The overall speed at which it restarts and installs things makes installing new drivers and programs that require restarts a hell of a lot quicker!Some speed comparisons
Well I'm sure you're all dying to see the numbers. I ran the AS SSD Benchmark on my Maxtor DiamondMax 22, which was a replacement for my totally broken WDC Caviar SE I was using until recently. I almost gave up and just scrapped it, but I persisted; you'll see why I wanted to stop it though:
And my X25-M showed marginal improvements
:
Gaming usage
Unfortunately I haven't really had a chance to test this aspect of the drive much. My early testing on this front has been very positive, though. Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising has some pretty detailed missions which used to take a fair bit of time to load. Now, on single player COOP, you definitely get into the action a bit more quickly. Although anybody who has played the game will know that even an SSD can't stop you having to walk several Klicks on some of the missions.
I have found, unsurprisingly, that game of the moment Battlefield Bad Company 2 still loads as slowly as ever on multiplayer. I hear this is an ATI issue though, so I'm not too concerned. I never really noticed any stuttering on these games, but I would be tempted to suggest that the minimum framerate is a bit better now - this is especially noticeable if you enable Vsync. It could partly be down to the new graphics driver, but the overall experience is very smooth.
Conclusion
After my fairly limited time using the drive, I have already got my computer back to a similar (actually better) state driver and essential program wise. The process of doing this (in particular installing Windows updates) has been a lot less painful than usual due to rapid installation and restart speeds. Everything on the OS like navigating about the control panel and system settings, the start menu and opening simple programs like Media Player and Windows Live is much more fluid. I would say that, overall, I am very impressed with the X25-M 80GB. Although I am not in a position to compare it to other SSDs, it has certainly been a worthwhile upgrade from a regular HDD. I also feel reassured that things are less likely to go wrong - but if I do need to start over and reformat, the whole thing won't be such a chore!
Last edited:
