Intel X25-E 32 GB Internal Solid State Drive

Not worth it

Strengths: SLC reliability, silence, read speed

Weakness: Write speed, price, small size

Bought 4 of these to use in a RAID0 array with an Areca 1231ML PCI-X8 RAID card, and I have to say it's just not worth it. Earlier I suffered at the hands of OCZ's Core SSD fiasco (4/4 that I bought failed!), and vowed not to buy MLC ever again. But Intel's own version of the MLC drive would probably have been a better choice than these SLC drives. I never knew until I bought them - and they're...
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Bought 4 of these to use in a RAID0 array with an Areca 1231ML PCI-X8 RAID card, and I have to say it's just not worth it. Earlier I suffered at the hands of OCZ's Core SSD fiasco (4/4 that I bought failed!), and vowed not to buy MLC ever again. But Intel's own version of the MLC drive would probably have been a better choice than these SLC drives. I never knew until I bought them - and they're not returnable, by the way - that SLC drives slow down terribly in terms of writes after you've written to them once already. This is the Achilles' heel of SLCs; apparently, after the first write, subsequent writes require some sort of double-pass in which the relevant area is reset, and then written over - as opposed to MLC, which can have more than just two states. So the only real benefit to spending so much on SLCs is their longevity, which is supposed to make them much more reliable than MLCs, long-term.

In terms of the 4-drive RAID0 speed, HDTach is able to note over 900Mbps at certain block sizes, but at others, it's typically in the 400s-500s. In the real world, I find that Vista64 boots very quickly, but that the rest of my computing experience doesn't really seem any faster than when using Velociraptors in RAID0 on the native ICH10R. (However, the SSDs are silent - and that can be priceless.)

My advice is to buy Intel's MLC version.

By Mason Storm - Dec 24, 2008

Intel SSD 2.5 inch X25-E Extreme 32GB SATA300 SSDSA2SH032G1GN

TestSeek.com has collected 11 expert reviews for Intel SSD 2.5 inch X25-E Extreme 32GB SATA300 SSDSA2SH032G1GN and the average expert rating is 65 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use TestSeek.com to find all ratings, product awards and conclusions.
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By testseek.com - May 11, 2009