The Intel X25-M 80GB drive is meant to be the mainstream drive that brings SSDs to mass market. We received the model SSDSA2MH080G-1GC, which has a 2.5-inch form factor similar to laptop hard disks. Enthusiasts would take to this drive right away, considering that it makes no noise at all and doesn't heat up. It helps conserve power too, with its rated usage of 60 mW (miJIiwatts) at idle and 150 mW during read/write operations, this is about one-hundredth of normal desktop HDDs.

In synthetic benchmarks, read speeds averaged a consistent 174.4 MBps-right across the drive, without ever a dip in the speed graph. Write speeds averaged a consistent 75.7 MBps with a CPU utilization of 5 percent. Random access times averaged 0.23 ms. In comparison, most desktop drives average 75 MBps read, 60 MBps write, and 12 ms random access time.



Real world write speed while copying a single large 6.42 GB onto the SSD stood at 73.86 MBps. Copying multiple smaller files (800 files totaling up to 6.36 GB) onto the SSD was almost the same speed, at 73.17. The reverse, copying files from the SSD onto the VelociRaptor was almost child's play since the SSD supplied data at 216 MBps and the limitation was the Velociraptor's write speed! Copying multiple small files from one partition to another was at 51.28 MBps.

An area where we noticed managed to beat it a large performance difference was application startup times (almost instantly). The only reason this SSD doesn't get an even higher rating, is the price. Also, the current generation of high capacity magnetic HODs easily exceed its sequential write speed and are much cheaper. However, if you can afford it, this is ideal for usage as an as drive.