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Macbook Pro meets the Intel X25

P

plesset

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 23, 2004
45
0
I just picked up an Intel X25-M 160GB drive from NewEgg. I have been using a rev b Macbook Air SDD which I thought was extremely fast....that is until I paired the Intel Drive with a brand new MBP 2.66. Ummm...wow. Its really fast. When the screen comes up after boot everything is already loaded and ready. With the Air SSD it takes about 2 seconds from the time you first see your wallpaper till you are ready to go. The Intel drive is instantaneous. Even though its still widely expensive I am convinced that an SSD upgrade is the single best thing you can do for your computer.

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hayduke said:
Nice upgrade. I'm debating adding one to my Quad 3.0GHz Mac Pro. My MBA with SD seems faster for regular use!
Click to expand...
Definitely get the SSD. It will feel like you have a brand new computer. Everything is so much quicker and more responsive. The difference is truly amazing!
 
Total space?

Just out of curiosity how much total space is your drive reporting? Mine is at 148.6 and I can't remember if that's what it was when I first installed it. I've heard total space in SSD's can decrease over time as bad cells are marked by the controller but I've only had it a few months.
 
Mine's running quite snappy with the x25-m 80 gig but I keep hearing these reports that the speed will gradually slow down. I've never written more than 45 gigs to this drive with the main install being OS and apps at the very beginning of its life and just normal usage for the last 10 gigs. Oh well, we'll see.

Photoshop CS4 loads in four seconds. Not bad.
 
Yup, I know the speed of the intel x25-m all too well.. sadly I sold it as it seems to eventually slow down in the write cycles (considerably) after prolonged usages. I saw this first hand as I move and extract about 50GB-150GB a day for the last 2 months.

This is just the flaw of any SSDs out there. It has to do with writing blocks but problems with erasing a whole page at a time (not being able to erase blocks) and rewriting new data which has an additional step that bottlenecks over time, especially after the SSD drive has a chance to use up all of its additional space.

There is an article about this that describes this effect, a great read. He explains it very detailed with easy to understand analogy of how SSDs erase and write new data and why that causes slow downs in the write cycles after prolong use. I learned so much about SSD drives just from this article (ANANDTECH).

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
 
jjahshik32 said:
Yup, I know the speed of the intel x25-m all too well.. sadly I sold it as it seems to eventually slow down in the write cycles (considerably) after prolonged usages. I saw this first hand as I move and extract about 50GB-150GB a day for the last 2 months.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531
Click to expand...

Agreed that it is a great article. He also states that "Despite the performance drop, these drives are still much faster than even the fastest hard drives."

Unfortunately nothing is perfect (not yet at least), but even with the speed drops nothing can touch a SSD in performance.
 
drew0020 said:
Agreed that it is a great article. He also states that "Despite the performance drop, these drives are still much faster than even the fastest hard drives."

Unfortunately nothing is perfect (not yet at least), but even with the speed drops nothing can touch a SSD in performance.
Click to expand...

Overall access/read speeds cannot be touched of the SSD models. But rewriting becomes slower than that of the 7200RPM hdds.

http://arstechnica.com/news/2009/02/sector-remap-fragmentation-slowing-intel-x25-m-ssds.ars

I really wanted the intel x25-m as the speeds are great and all but after my excessive use of the drives for a little over 1 1/2 months.. it slowed down to a crawl in the write category. Actually jumping back on the 7200rpm hdd the writes were incredibly faster, although I do miss the incredible read speed.

I'm going to stay away from SSD drives probably for another year or so and see if there are any new features/tweaks to the newer controllers that will fix the one errors that the SSDs currently suffer from.
 
Do these speed drops keep getting worse and worse though?
Or does it hit a level and then stay at that speed.

SSD's are very new at the moment. I'd hate to read that in 12 months they are all running like 2000RPM hard disks from 1995.

Regards,
Simon
 
The Anand Tech article had some invaluable information concerning SSD's. It was a great marketing tool as well, because I decided to pick up one of the OCZ Vertex drives on Newegg. I can't wait til it comes in.
 
The Anandtech article said that the slow down seemed to level off. I am not too concerned though since it seems like these problems occurred when you are pushing the drive really hard for long periods of time. I am hoping that by the time I start to see this problem intel will have released a firmware fix.
 
At any rate, the article also proved that even after they're in a "worn state," SSD's are still faster than the comparable HDD's.
 
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