Intel launches $125 X25-V SSD

Robert Hallock 16 Mar, 2010 at 2:37pm ET Article published in Tech

Intel yesterday unveiled the 40GB X25-V SSD, a value-oriented solid state disk with an MSRP of just $125.

“Priced at $125, the 40 gigabyte (GB) drive is aimed at value segment netbooks and dual-drive/boot drive desktop set-ups to offer users the performance and reliability advantages of solid-state computing at an affordable, entry-level price,” Intel said in a press release.

The company is billing the new SSD as an application accelerator, or a boot drive to be combined with a mechanical hard disk for mass storage. By offloading the task of writing and storing big files to an HDD, the user can benefit from fast operating system performance without compromising the lifetime of their SSD.

“In a dual-drive configuration, the Intel X25-V SSD is added to a desktop with an existing HDD. The SSD is loaded with the operating system and favorite applications to take advantage of the speedy performance which is nearly 4x faster than a 7200RPM HDD,” Intel reports of the drive’s performance in PCMark Vantage. “Users keep their existing HDD as a means of higher capacity data storage. This capability is commonly referred to as a ‘boot’ drive since the SSD accelerates boot or start up time.”

Featuring industry-leading 34nm NAND flash, ATA TRIM support andread/write speeds of 170/35MBps, the Intel X25-V is now available at your favorite online retailer.

Comments

16 Mar 2010 ~ 2:58pm NiGHTS Downside quick and dirty in taking this over other more expensive models? I'm assuming read/write is slower or something - real world differences?
16 Mar 2010 ~ 3:30pm Thrax Write speed is about 3x slower than what you could consider a "slow" SSD in the performance segment. Peak read speed is average. However, I have not seen any benchmarks thus far, so I can't say anything about the drive's random 4kb read performance, which is what Windows depends on the most for performance gains that are obvious to the user.

Mechanical hard drives have 4kb read performance of just half a megabyte per second. Good SSDs like the Intel X25-M G2 (this drive's big brother) approach 60MB/s.
16 Mar 2010 ~ 8:36pm Tim 170/35... quite a disparity there.

Don't you just love how marketing people use words like "value, value-minded, and economical" as pseudonyms for people who are too cheap to pay for the top speed versions? And products that failed the high speed tests so they were reprogrammed to become this new "value" line of products?

$125 is certainly a better price than any other SSD.
16 Mar 2010 ~ 9:23pm mas0n 30GB Vertex is $89 after rebate from NewEgg right now and sports significantly higher sequential write speeds. However, as Thrax pointed out, 4K random r/w performance is what really drives the common user experience and that has yet to be benchmarked, at least publicly. If this performs even half as well as the X25-M G2 in 4K, it's a steal at that price. My 2x30GB Vertex "only" pull ~25MBs in random 4K reads.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 1:35pm Tim From the above link to Newegg - part of their advertising BS says "Packing a MASSIVE 30 GB of storage"... LOL !

30 GB in a single drive hasn't been "massive" since about 2001 !

$90 AFTER rebate is nice, but it's such a pain to have to mail in rebate cards and wait to get it, so that by the time you do get it you hardly notice it, unless your bank account is on empty.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 1:45pm Cliff_Forster I so desperately want to buy a SSD, but I can't help but feel like its all still in its infancy, and that in another year you will be able to waltz into the local Staples and buy a 128 GB Sata 3 model for $99

I want it badly, but I'm going to defer gratification just a little while longer.
17 Mar 2010 ~ 2:24pm shwaip

Tim wrote:

From the above link to Newegg - part of their advertising BS says "Packing a MASSIVE 30 GB of storage"... LOL !

30 GB in a single drive hasn't been "massive" since about 2001 !

$90 AFTER rebate is nice, but it's such a pain to have to mail in rebate cards and wait to get it, so that by the time you do get it you hardly notice it, unless your bank account is on empty.

You're all about things that were new in 2001, this should be right up your alley.