Intel X25-M G2 Solid State Drives

conrad, most people buying the intel ssd's are using them for their laptops, they are using them for desktops. Laptops are slow by definition so no point spending £170 on the intel drive. Most are using them for OS/APP/GAME drives and a larger drive for storage.
 
conrad, most people buying the intel ssd's are using them for their laptops, they are using them for desktops. Laptops are slow by definition so no point spending £170 on the intel drive. Most are using them for OS/APP/GAME drives and a larger drive for storage.

How is a laptop slow by definition? They may be more expensive than an equivalent desktop, but i wouldn't define all laptops as slow.

And i assume you mean aren't using them for laptops? The laptop markets huge now, and adding a SSD really does boost user experience. Personally I think I'd prefer to have a laptop boot up incredibly fast than have my desktop boot fast.

I do agree that at the moment they are more widely used in desktops, but I see them being far more beneficial to laptops (especially when you consider low heat, low power, no noise and no having parts).
 
using a ssd on a laptop i find more beneficial than I think I would on a desktop. On my work laptop i'm regularly on the move and it gets thrown in and out of bags/suitcases, so the decreased risk of it failing versus a traditional hard drive is a real benefit.

Also, the boot time improvements really helps working on the go, as often i might grab 20 minutes to do some work between meetings, so the quicker boot time improves the amount of time i have to get work done.
 
Despite the protests above about transfer speeds not being important, they are. I don't want to be taking longer to install programs/windows on my SSD than I was on my traditional hard disks beforehand.

Do any of the people in this thread actually read anything?

The 1st gen Intel SSD's are already fastest at OS start up/shut down, software/Windows/game install, game loading, opening software, OS responsiveness -
Random read/write of smaller files is used for all this stuff, which the Intel SSD's excel at. Sustained write is barely used for this. When you install something for instance does it install one single very large file or loads of small ones!
If you wont take my word for it go read the MANY reviews and articles that back this up.
 
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Do any of the people in this thread actually read anything?

The 1st gen Intel SSD's are already fastest at OS start up/shut down, software/Windows/game install, game loading, opening software, OS responsiveness -
Random read/write of smaller files is used for all this stuff, which the Intel SSD's excel at. Sustained write is barely used for this. When you install something for instance does it install one single very large file or loads of small ones!
If you wont take my word for it go read the MANY reviews and articles that back this up.

+1,

As said before the speeds are just for show really, barely anyone will need a mega fast SSD, unless you spend all day transferring single large files.



Itunes, around 90MB for installation, split into 775 files, that's about what 110KB per file. Installation is barely effected by fast sustained write speeds.


The only important sustained speed is read, OS's spend more time reading then writing.
 
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Show me some reviews that show you how long it took to install an application Vs other SSD's or HDD's and I'll be happy to believe you. Because I don't recall seeing anything but reviews showing benchmark programs and application read times.

Cheers :)
 
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I'll be joining you with that. :)

Good stuff.

But I'm away from Sun till Tuesday so I won't be able to order if they do go up on Monday. You going for 80gb model?

Yep, I will most probaly be purchasing the 80GB model of the Intel X25-M G2. I can't wait. :p

Despite the protests above about transfer speeds not being important, they are. I don't want to be taking longer to install programs/windows on my SSD than I was on my traditional hard disks beforehand.

I have had the chance to use the Intel X25-M G1 solid state drive and the amount of time it took to install Windows Vista followed by several of my applications and I didn't notice really notice much difference compared to doing the same type of operation on a 7200rpm hard drive. It was definitely not slower - Edit: What I have just said isn't completely correct which I have explained why in this post here.
 
How is a laptop slow by definition? They may be more expensive than an equivalent desktop, but i wouldn't define all laptops as slow.

And i assume you mean aren't using them for laptops? The laptop markets huge now, and adding a SSD really does boost user experience. Personally I think I'd prefer to have a laptop boot up incredibly fast than have my desktop boot fast.

I do agree that at the moment they are more widely used in desktops, but I see them being far more beneficial to laptops (especially when you consider low heat, low power, no noise and no having parts).

laptops generally only have support for 1 harddrive and 60/80/128gb often isn't enough so ssd's wont catch on for quite sometime, its desktop users who want these as they can have a seperate 1tb drive for storage.
 
I have had the chance to use the Intel X25-M G1 solid state drive and the amount of time it took to install Windows Vista followed by several of my applications and I didn't notice really noticed much difference compared to doing the same type of operation on a 7200rpm hard drive. It was definitely not slower.

Yes but my point is how can you just be happy with that? To my mind it seems wrong you're happy to accept your £250-300 odd Intel G1 SSD is able to install apps in the same time as the average £30-40 HDD, and for me it's even harder to stomach when other SSD's like the Vertex has write speeds up to 180Mb/s which is damn impressive.

I do know what you're saying about how much you read compared to writing, but I think it's an uneven balance, I mean how much do you think your PC actually reads that you would notice while you're sitting there surfing the net? You boot into Windows, you load your apps and job done.

I simply feel the Intel is lacking as an all round package. If other drives can balance it out better I feel the Intel should be able too as well considering it's meant to be the benchmark for others to follow. Seems to me it will be superceeded as the benchmark very quickly.
 
Yes but my point is how can you just be happy with that? To my mind it seems wrong you're happy to accept your £250-300 odd Intel G1 SSD is able to install apps in the same time as the average £30-40 HDD, and for me it's even harder to stomach when other SSD's like the Vertex has write speeds up to 180Mb/s which is damn impressive.

I apologies, I quoted the wrong post of yours, which I have now fixed. I was purely responding to the part of your post outlining that you didn't want to purchase a solid state drive that installed software slower than a mechanical hard drive and I was simply clarifying that this was not the case. Though, admittedly, I took very little time in taking the time out to thoroughly test the sort of time it takes when installing software so my experience isn't to be relied upon.

It seems that I myself have caused a massive confusion regarding this because I had stated installation times took around the same amount of time as if I was using a mechanical hard drive which may contradict with actual facts. I very, very much apologise for saying what I had said. I shouldn't have made such a blanket statement regarding my experiences before having thoroughly tested things beforehand.

Moving on though - Firstly, MR.B has reported in his post here and also this one here talks about the sorts of time it takes to install software (which was your main concern) amongst a number of other operations is dependent on random read and write performance which the Intel X25-M solid state drives excel in. In this thread here over at the Anandtech forums, glugglug reports this as well:

glugglug said:
I guarantee installing stuff is dramatically faster than a Velociraptor. Random writes matter more than sequential even for that. Your typical installer application does a lot of random writes to register all the COM classes used by and file type recognized by the app, and to set stuff up for the Add/Remove programs app, etc. The only part that would be mostly sequential is copying game assets. And anyways where are you installing stuff from? Your DVD drive can't read much more than 10MB/s (and even that it can only reach on the second half of the disk).

The ONLY place where you will see an effect from the lower sequential write speed is copying large files to it. Well that and crash dumps. And even then it's better than most conventional hard drives. For the crash dumps I recommend making the WER directory a junction so they go to another drive. Also, consider this:
Velociraptor access time = 7.5ms (4.5ms seek time, plus 3ms for the platter to spin halfway around at 10K rpm to get to where it needs to be on average). 7.5ms * 70MB/s = 525KB head start for the SSD writing each file before the raptor even gets positioned to start the write. Since the Velociraptor's sequential write speed is 27.9MB/s faster than the SSD it takes 18.8ms for it to catch up, after writing 1842.2KB So when we say the Velociraptor has an advantage on "large" writes, this really means multi-megabyte files only. Writes this large are pretty rare. So much so that if the fragments of a huge file are all larger than 64MB, the defraggers built into Vista and Windows 7 don't consider the file to be fragmented.

Edit - I was always under the impression that the installation process of Windows and applications was more of a sequential operation and not random. Would you be able to clarify this please MR.B or anyone else that understands this.

Anandtech reports the following:

Anandtech said:
Arguably much more important to any PC user than sequential read/write performance is random access performance. It's not often that you're writing large files sequentially to your disk, but you do encounter tons of small file reads/writes as you use your PC.

The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ - Random Read/Write Performance

Anandtech said:
There are four basic pillars to SSD performance that I like to look at: random read, random write, sequential read and sequential write speed. A good SSD must be strong in all four categories, but some are more noticeable than others. Random read and write speed, particularly of small files (e.g. 4KB) are normally what make our desktop hard drives feel so slow. These random operations are everything from file and table updates to search queries and loading applications; they aren't random over the entire space of the disk but they are random enough to bring conventional hard drives to their knees.

Sequential read/write speed is what you encounter when copying large files. How quickly you can move a Blu-ray image around is determined by these values.

Intel X25-M G2: Dissected and Performance Preview - The Performance

It's also only sequential writes that the Intel X25-M solid state series drives falls back on compared to say the OCZ Vertex as shown in the The SSD Update: Vertex Gets Faster, New Indilinx Drives and Intel/MacBook Problems Resolved review on the following page - The Bright Side: The Vertex is Nearly 3x as Fast.

Edit - Regarding the quote above, it states that sequential writes is what you encounter when copying large files. However, having a read of the article over at PC Perspective - Intel X25-M 'G2' 34nm 160GB SSD Review - PCPer File Copy Test it seems to show that the copying of relatively small files is slower on the Intel X25-M G2 compared to say the OCZ Vertex due to the advertised write speeds. Surely this shows that it is not just the copying of large files which is a sequential operation?

I do know what you're saying about how much you read compared to writing, but I think it's an uneven balance, I mean how much do you think your PC actually reads that you would notice while you're sitting there surfing the net? You boot into Windows, you load your apps and job done.

To address what you have said in the above quote - If you're simply taking the viewpoint that your system will not be affected by the random read speeds when you're simply reading the internet, then the same also applies to sequential writes, neither will be effecting things in that kind of situation. In fact, you may as well just use a mechanical hard drive since the difference between one of those and a solid state drive when simply surfing the internet will be minimal. However, I know when I am using my system, my internet browser is always open but I also perform a number of other tasks on my machine where the higher random read and write performance will be off great benefit.

Regarding your last part of the above quote where you have said that once you have loaded into Windows and loaded your applications, it's job done. Though, these operations benefit from random read and write performance.

I simply feel the Intel is lacking as an all round package. If other drives can balance it out better I feel the Intel should be able too as well considering it's meant to be the benchmark for others to follow. Seems to me it will be superceeded as the benchmark very quickly.

Intel have optimised their drives with a main focus on the primary types of situations where the user is likely to be affected the most and the fact is, it's random read and write performance that makes your system so slow and Intel have simply focused on this area more. Though, there is no denying the fact that Intel need to improve their sequential write speeds to keep in line with the competition. However, this shouldn't be much of a concern to anyone since not a lot of people do many sequential write operations.
 
A well written reply and I'm sure theres truth in everything you say and have referred too.

I think I'll wait for some user feedback and professional reviews of the Intel G2s before committing to buying a SSD. Also I'm keen to see how much the Vertex/Apex and G.Skill Falcons drop in a few weeks with the price cuts, as the 120Gb models are more in my sweet spot than 80Gb, just a little more room to work with.

Update: Out of interest are the 80Gb drives as fast as the 160Gb drives? The reviews I was reading were for the 160Gb drive, but usually the smaller capacities seem slower.
 
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Sorry Stonedofmoo but I have made pretty big mockery of my reply, once again. There were a couple of things that I had missed out in my post which would have split the reply up as I originally intended instead it appeared to state some of the things that I had written as facts coming from me. Once again, I apologise for all the confusion. It would appear that I am making things a lot more complicated. :(

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If anyone is looking at purchasing the new Intel X25-M G2, then you may want to be aware that Intel have just released an announcement regarding a known bug in the current firmware version, which admittedly, isn't too big of a problem.

Announcement:

PC Perspective said:
***Public Service Announcement***

Intel has informed me of a bug in the X25-M G2 shipping firmware (02G2). This bug is specific to setting a hard drive password in your BIOS. If you have set a BIOS HDD password, then subsequently change or disable that password, the SSD may become inoperable. Intel is correcting the issue in firmware and will be posting a fix shortly. In summary:

* DO NOT set a BIOS HDD password on an X25-M G2.
* If you already have, DO NOT CHANGE OR DISABLE the BIOS HDD password.

It will be safe to do either of the above once the X25-M G2 is flashed to a newer firmware to be released by Intel shortly. Firmware, when available, can be reached by this not-yet-live link.

***End Public Service Announcement***

Source - Here

I have also added this announcement to the orginal post.

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If you're interested in reviews of the Intel X25-M G2, then I have just listed the ones below which I am currently aware off. I have also added them to the first post in case anyone misses the posts where people have linked to any of the reviews.

Reviews:

Intel X25-M 'G2' 34nm 160GB SSD Review - PC Perspective

Intel X25-M G2: Dissected and Performance Preview - Anandtech

Intel's second-generation X25-M solid-state drive - More than just a 34nm die shrink - The Tech Report

Intel X25-M 160GB 34nm MLC G2 SSD Benchmark Review - LegitReviews

Intel 34nm X25-M Gen 2 SSD Performance Review - HotHardware
 
Edit - I was always under the impression that the installation process of Windows and applications was more of a sequential operation and not random. Would you be able to clarify this please MR.B or anyone else that understands this.

Yep everything in the quote by glugglug within your post is accurate. Pretty much the only thing where the Intel SSD's would be slower than a OCZ Vertex SSD (for instance) would be in copying large files. The Intel's would be faster at installing anything, and doing just about anything else.

I already have two Vertex SSD's in RAID0, and if i had to choose between them and two Intel G2 SSD's i'd go for the Intel SSD's. But to be honest there will be little noticeable difference between either. When i get two of these new Intel's it will be a pretty small upgrade from my Vertex's.

But having also owned VelociRaptor HDD's i can say that these SSD's are a big upgrade from them.
 
laptops generally only have support for 1 harddrive and 60/80/128gb often isn't enough so ssd's wont catch on for quite sometime, its desktop users who want these as they can have a seperate 1tb drive for storage.

You say that, but the average person still hasn't got terabytes of space. Take the steam hardware survey :
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/

44.17% of computer gamers (not limited to laptop users) have less than 250gb of hard drive space. For a large amount of people a 128gb hard drive is more than enough.

I think they've got good potential when combined with netbooks too, all we need is price reductions.
 
My current laptop (Macbook Alu) has 200GB and I find that plenty. Downsizing to 160GB shouldn't be too much of a squeeze. 80GB is really just too small though.
 
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