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We have looked at the Intel X25-V drives before and you can get a more detailed recap on the unit over here.
For those of you too lazy to click the link, here is a brief reminder.
The Intel X25-V takes many of the positive aspects of the drives from the second generation flagship SSD’s. There is garbage collection and wear leveling encorporated as well as native support for the TRIM command which is built into Windows 7. There is also a handy SSD Optimiser application which can be used in Windows XP or Vista to help perform routine flash maintenance. While Windows 7 is still ideal for an SSD, it is nice to see a little extra thought going into the design to help people who have yet to upgrade (or don’t want to).
This Optimiser application can be set to start automatically on a pre defined schedule, such as overnight when you aren’t using the computer. It can also be run manually however Intel do state that when it runs, computer use should be kept to a minimum – as it only lasts a few minutes its not a massive headache.
Intel offer a 3 year warranty with the drive, which is sure to bring peace of mind to any prospective customer.
The four units we received, fully clothed. You can't go wrong with a simple, yet attractive blue and white accented design.
When is four better than one? When you are using SSD's of course. The Intel drives look like all the other Intel drives we have tested, the black rubber surrounding is classic Intel.
The Intel DP55WG board may not be a first choice for many people, but it has proven to be a rock solid performer in many of our system builds. This board is also a fantastic overclocker as we hit 5ghz on air cooling with a 655k a while ago.
Setting up four drives is intuitive via the Intel Matrix Storage Manager and only takes a few seconds.
Our raid system set up and ready to rock.
The final windows 7 ultimate 64 bit installation. We use a 32GB Corsair Survivor for our installation, and with this Raid 0 x 4 configuration, it took just over 10 minutes. Yes, 10 minutes to install Windows 7.
This site just gets cooler every day. what an awesome idea.
Over 650MB/s. Almost spat out my tea there, what a great concept idea from intel and very cool of them to send you 4 SSDS for this !
Tips my hat to you Zardon. what a brilliant idea and its actually VERY practical. this is easily upgraded over the months.
That is immense. I love the Corsair F40s and they would be faster than four of these, but if the prices of these drives drop to 80 each, what a bloody great deal. I STILL strongly believe that write speed is no where near as important as read in windows environment. Not outside a server anyway. This is a good indication of read performance.
Until you broke it down on conclusion page I had a brief moment of “WTF!” when I saw the review title. Great idea and it does scale very well, single drive write of 35mb/s is poorish, but it really helps in raid 0. Also that is brilliant to hear their raid 0 controller can still offer TRIM support! That might mean the edge over corsair.
Raid 0 TRIM support? I must have missed that one. intel stepped up to the plate with that. only maker I know who supports that unless ive missed more.
over 650 megabytes per second. Its quite amusing to see that. I know the PCIe controllers are much higher cost for this level of performance from flash memory.
holy crap batman – thats some mega bandwidth !!!!!
Very impressed with this – very interesting article.
An interesting point was made. People might look at this and say/ what the hell is the point? but when you look at the price in total, thats actually LESS than I paid for my first big mechanical hard drive. we are so spolit for choice now. clearly im showing my age.
I would be happy with one of these ! Seriously. I might get one from yoyotech when prices drop.
Is kitguru working with yoyotech now? I live near the store. might pop in and say hello.
As much as the article is fascinating, I dont think this is very realistic for most people. I mean you are using 4 SATA ports on your motherboard for a start which means most of them are gone without getting any mechanical drives.
@ Dan. I don’t agree. most motherboards now have 6 sata ports. even lower end boards. so you would be left with at least 2 slots. 2x2TB hard drives. 4TB mechanical ‘storage’ and mega quick boot up. Works for me and most people I would think.
4 SSDs? I almost swallowed my spoon there.
What is the point of this? 650 MB/s who the hell needs that?
@ Robert, probably not many ‘need it’ but people in some countries would say the same thing about the spoon you just swallowed. thats classed as a luxury also 😉
I think its interesting. If you did it with 256GB Crucial drives at £550 a pop then I might slap some heads, but these are meant to be dropping to £80 a piece soon, its not a lot really for maximum performance.
Fascinating idea really. and it works well. the write performance is quite low, even with four, but i guess it doesnt translate into crap real world performance
Great idea, love it. well done.
The game test got me, the start up time, thats wicked.
Scrummy. COrsair F40 are better but a little more expensive. Have to say I had no idea you lost TRIM support in RAid 0 so the fact Intel support it seems to be a decided factor.
Very nice testing idea, and its a good upgrade option for many users. the 40GB drives seem a great choice right now. Think the corsair ones are also very good.
Great review thanks for the unusual tests, really appeal to me. First time posting, but long time reader.