Linda posted on October 31, 2008 15:47
Earlier this week, I was able to attend the fall Intel Channel Conference. One of the sessions featured a demonstration of the X25-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drive.
In this demonstration, two computers were rebooted simultaneously. One system contained Intel's next generation processor which has yet to be officially released. The other, the X25-M drive and a much less capable processor. The Intel rep with the new processor was of course predicting that his machine would reboot much more quickly. The presence of the SSD was not mentioned at this point in the presentation.
So the reboot began, and within 15 or 20 seconds, the machine with the slower processor was back to the Vista desktop. The other machine took at least twice as long to reboot.
While I have always realized that anything that is I/O intensive is always limited by the speed of the hard drive, this demonstration was quite dramatic. And hopefully most of us don't reboot our machines several times a day, so how long a reboot takes may not be particularly important. But if a reboot happens that quickly, obviously anything else that has to read or write from the hard drive will also be much, much faster.
This drive is a 2.5" SATA drive, that can be installed in your notebook in place of the mechanical drive that you are probably using today. Intel has focused on delivering performance and reliability. You can most certainly find less expensive drives and you can find larger drives, but don't expect to find the same performance and reliability from other manufacturers. Some SSD's will not outperform mechanical drives, so if performance is your issue, but sure you make sure you know what you are really getting.
Another big advantage of SSD drives is the reduction in power requirements. Installing this drive in your notebook will increase your battery life by as much as 30 minutes.
The 80GB model has a price of $650 to $700, but expect prices to drop over the next year. A 160GB model is expected to be released in 2009. This particular model is aimed at the mobile market, but enterprise class drives are also coming into the market and will improve server performance even more dramatically than in the mobile market.