Intel Releases Ultra-Fast X25-M SSD

Unless there is some sort of revelation with regards to the traditional hard drive soon, SSD is likely going to become the future of storage. If you ask a hard drive vendor, they’ll tell you that SSD might be the future, but the traditional hard drive will still be the ultimate choice. It’s hard to disagree, since right now, you can score a 1TB drive for under $200, whereas a 64GB SSD is 50% higher than that.

What’s helping the progression is fierce development though, especially from Intel. They offered insight into their SSD’s a few weeks ago at IDF that laid out a great outlook, and today, we see the launch of one hardcore-fast product, the X25-M 80GB SSD.

Our friends at the Tech Report have taken the new drive for a spin, and overall their opinions are good. The drive has top-of-the-line read speeds, but lacks quite a bit where write speeds are concerned, common of MLC-based drives. The end result was around 70MB/s write, which pales in comparison to some hard drives out there. Hopefully we’ll see this issue tackled over the course of the next year, because it’s an important one on a product that costs 10x more per GB.

Price is another problem for solid-state drives, and with the 80GB X25-M slated to sell for just under $600 in 1,000-unit quantities, Intel’s first entry in the market won’t be cheap. At that price, the X-25M sits between budget MLC-based models and their more expensive SLC-based cousins, which seems about right to me. After all, the X25-M was often faster than Samsung’s SLC-based FlashSSD, which costs nearly $800 for only 64GB.