Question about Intel X25M SSD.

[Undercover_Man]

So I've been doing research on SSD's now and I think the Intel x25M drives are the ones everyone getting. I go an look up prices and I see some are made by other companies. Are these the same drives? Do they treat these like video cards and make the technology and send them out to other companies to tweak and sell? I ask cuz I saw Kingston selling an Intel x25M so that got me confused.

Are the Intel X25M drives the fastest so far? For best performance you get 2 and raid 0 them, right? I've seen up to 80GB capacity I think. Are there any bigger capacity drives of this kind?

 

[Old Hippie]

So I've been doing research on SSD's now and I think the Intel x25M drives are the ones everyone getting. I go an look up prices and I see some are made by other companies. Are these the same drives? Do they treat these like video cards and make the technology and send them out to other companies to tweak and sell? I ask cuz I saw Kingston selling an Intel x25M so that got me confused.

Are the Intel X25M drives the fastest so far? For best performance you get 2 and raid 0 them, right? I've seen up to 80GB capacity I think. Are there any bigger capacity drives of this kind?

All great questions that have been answered many times before.

The Intel drives are pretty much "King of the Hill" if you can afford them.

Good Luck!

 

[Little_4nic8er]

SSDSA2MH080G2C1 That is the Intel X25-M 80GB 34NM Postville. (Which I have and love.)

SSDSA2MH160G2C1 That is the Intel X25-M 160GB 34NM Postville. (Slightly faster than the 80GB version.)

Just make sure it's one of those product numbers, and you will be good. (The G2 part near the end is important, it's the newer versions.)

Yes, the Intel drives are the fastest so far.

Yes, 2 in RAID is fast, but you lose TRIM. (The cleanup feature in Vista/W7 that extends your drives life.)

 

[hhara]

The Kingston M Series and the Intel X-25M are the same. I have one of each, and they have the exact same P/N that is listed on the two drives, in the bios and in Windows 7. That number being SSDSA2M080G2GC which is the X-25M Generation 2 and the GC is just to clarify how it was packaged.

They are the same drive, Kingston just slapped their own sticker on it. If you want more evidence I can provide it as I took some pictures a while back when I first got my hands on the Kingston M drive.

Edit: Here they are anways...

 

[C-rizzle]

The 80Gb & 160Gb Kingston M series are the same exact thing as the Intel X25-M's.

However the Kingston V series 40Gb is slightly "different", as the firmware it comes with doesn't support TRIM.

You can hack / flash it to an Intel firmware and the computer / drive etc... all think its an Intel X25-V 40Gb.

 

[Undercover_Man]

Hmmm....I have a question. The 160GB is only slightly faster than the 80GB. Which would make more sense in my situation. I could get 2x 80GB and raid 0 them and be done with SSD's in my system, or buy 1x 160GB and buy another 160GB later on down the road?

And don't say I should buy the 160GB and spend the money that could buy me another 160GB for something else cuz there really won't BE much of anything else to upgrade. I'm throwing a few grand in this rig as is and it'll be a monster on steroids of a PC.

I guess I'm just wondering if there would be a big difference between 2x 80GB to 1x 160GB. However, aren't there supposed to be another release of new Intel SSD's towards the end of the year? I'd have saved up more than enough money by then, so maybe an 80GB now and sell it for dual new Intel SSD's.

Or if I'd still get a good portion of my money back, I could just get 2x 80GB's and sell them for dual bigger uber elite new Intel SSD's when they come out.

What would you guys suggest?

 

[xnoodle]

TRIM won't work on drives inside a raid so I would go with the 1x160GB.

 

[Undercover_Man]

If TRIM doesn't work in raid, then why are so many ppl doing that? Doesn't not having TRIM affect performance or speed or something? I thought it was bad to not have that for the SSD. I have been researching this TRIM thing and I can't fully understand why it's important. I know it's something like it tells the SSD when data blocks are not in use anymore, but that sounds like it doesn't know when something is deleted. I see it explained different ways, but I still don't really get it when I put them all together.

Couldn't I just wipe the SSD clean every once in a while and ghost it back or does not having TRIM cause irreversible damage?

 

[xnoodle]

Performance will degrade without TRIM. You can wipe it to go back to a clean slate, but that's a hassle; It's up to you ultimately.

Alternatively some people use OCZ SSD's in RAID0 and keep the regular garbage collection firmware on it, choosing not to update to the TRIM capable firmware so they can use it in RAID.

 

[lilfiend]

ssd's write to random blocks inside of it, once it has written to all of the blocks at least once, it slows down some, because now it has to flash erase the block, then write to it, i dont actually see MUCH of a difference, and you can raid 0 the kingston ones with the intel ones, the kingston ones are exactly the same, just different stickers, and most onboard sata controllers wont be able to keep up with the speed, get a decent raid card (dad has a rocket raid 4005 or something like that with 4 intel x25-m drives in raid 0, G1 though, not G2) hopefully that helps you

 

[Little_4nic8er]

The Kingston M Series and the Intel X-25M are the same. I have one of each, and they have the exact same P/N that is listed on the two drives, in the bios and in Windows 7. That number being SSDSA2M080G2GC which is the X-25M Generation 2 and the GC is just to clarify how it was packaged.

They are the same drive, Kingston just slapped their own sticker on it. If you want more evidence I can provide it as I took some pictures a while back when I first got my hands on the Kingston M drive.

Edit: Here they are anways...

Interesting, I didn't realize they were identical under the hood. (Thought they shared some similarities/technologies, but not identical.)

 

[Impulse]

They are, the only X25-M drives you should be wary off are those from other brands besides Kingston... Those could be G1 drives which will never support TRIM (Intel just decided to not put out a firmware update for them, they were based around 50nm flash IIRC).

I'd just get a single 80GB or 160GB first and see if you're happy with the performance, yeah two in RAID would be even faster but you'd have to deal w/wiping them every few months (at 'least until TRIM-capable RAID drivers are released) and unless you're doing some pretty high end stuff then you may be entirely satisfied w/a single drive, they're fast enough as it is for most people. The 80GB you should be able to find for $250 or less, anything more is a rip-off. (plenty of stores are still price gouging because of the high demand tho)

The model #s that end in C1, C0, and R5 are all the same drives btw... The differences are just OEM vs retail (both the CX's are OEM, I think one comes w/a spacer necessary for laptop use and the other one doesn't, Google's your friend). R5 packages come w/a lil' 2.5-to-3.5" bracket and a sticker.

Using 'em w/o TRIM won't cause irreversible damage btw, but performance will degrade slowly over time as you use it. You can wipe it to restore performance, tho it involves a lil' more than just deleting w/e's on it (you'd have to image your OS install, take down the array, run the optimizer tool on it I think, re-build the array, then restore your backup). A lot of people don't mind, or as someone else mentioned they use OCZ drives which have GC routines which run when the drive is idle and perform the same function as TRIM (almost as good as having TRIM, tho you have to make some allowances so that there's some idle time and GC is allowed to run).

No one really knows when Intel will refresh their lineup, presumably at year's end (or beginning of next year) they'll release new drives w/25nm flash, but they could issue a refresh before then (or more performance-boosting firmware updates). Do note that there are other competitors entering the market in the interim, Micron/Crucial are set to release their 120GB drive this month for around $400 and it should compete very well performance-wise w/Intel's more expensive 160GB X25-M (granted it's 40GB smaller). OCZ will be releasing it's Vertex 2 line based on SandForce controllers before too long as well.

If you ask me the jump in performance between regular HDDs and these SSD is large enough that you'd be unlikely to notice the difference in performance between any of the different SSD under real-world usage... Unless you plan to write large data files to them continuously or something (in which case an Intel drive may not be for you as sequential writes are their one Achilles heel). Just get w/e you can afford or as large a drive as you think you need...

Personally I went w/an 80GB for my desktop because I wasn't willing to pay more than $250 and it was a better bang for the buck than any of the 60GB Indillix-based drives (at the time at 'least)... It's not a big deal to use symlinks to move some game directories around to manage space w/o breaking their installs (even for moving individual games out of the Steam folder).