Hot on the heels of the OCZ’s 32GB solid state disk for $100, Intel has launched a new 40GB SSD that sells for $125. While that’s not exactly cheap at a time when you can get a 1TB hard drive for less, it’s nice to see SSD prices starting to come down. Solid State disks tend to be sturdier than hard drives thanks to the lack of moving parts. And SSDs are generally capable of much greater speeds than hard drives, although that varies from model to model.
The new Intel X25-V Value SATA SSD offers read speeds up to 170MB/s and write speeds up to 35MB/s. The 2.5 inch disk could be used for netbooks or notebooks, or you can throw it in a desktop PC for use as a boot drive, allowing you to load the operating system and applications on the faster SSD while leaving the hard drive for media and other data files.
via Computer World
Even though the Intel drives don’t have a fast sequential write speed, their random write speeds are much faster than the competition. So, small OS write to disk will be much faster on the Intel SSD than other SSD’s twice the price. This have been out for a while. Your money is well spent with either this SSD or the Kingston version.
Hmm, I believe this SSD has been on the market for a few months now. NewEgg had them as a Shell Shocker deal back in Nov.
Considering these speeds, I’d rather go with a 30GB OCZ Vertex. You can get them for cheaper than this, and they’re much faster. Downside is, you lose 10GB. I’ll take the extra speed and use this as my boot drive/netbook drive.
That may be a typo. I don’t see why Intel’s own budget SSD would be slower than the same Kingston 40GB SSD that uses Intel’s own controller chip that is in the X-25M.
It’s probably just a Boot Drive SSD, they sacrifice write speed to lower the cost and just have fast read speed for quick boot up… price doesn’t seem worth it though.
Yeah – 35MB/s for large sequential writes is glacial for an SSD. If that’s the marketing number, this thing is likely to feel slower than a desktop hard drive. And since you can get 100MB/s write/200MB/s read 64GB SSDs for $200ish now, this is not a great deal IMO.
Write speed of 35MB/sec? That’s going to be best case scenario. Which means it’s likely this will CRAWL on small file writes; i.e. what your OS is doing constantly. It’s possible that it won’t degrade as severely – Intel has done some excellent SSD tech – but that kind of performance has never meant good things in the past.
While we’re talking Intel though, where the heck are the 320GB X-25’s promised for late 2009, and where are the associated price drops?