The Intel X25V 40GB is one of the most affordable SSD drives currently on the market. The question that needs answered however … is this the drive for you?
If you are working to a tight budget, then yes, it is a viable option but in a portable workplace the size is limited and not many laptops give you the option for Raid 0 configurations to further increase the speed and double the storage. I would feel that most people would need an external USB 2 powered drive for primary storage. Whether this is for you specifically, is very much a personal decision. That said, I wouldn't really class these as ideal laptop drives. Bear with me.
In a desktop environment the drive makes more sense, which is clearly what Intel had in mind as they supply a 3.5 inch mounting rack for easy fitting. Installing Windows 7 eats up a large portion of the drive but many people will have several, internal, large mechanical drives to be used for application and file storage.
The drives performance for the money is absolutely first class, no doubt about it. Sequential reads are fantastic and although we expect Intel's write speeds to suffer, for the most part they honestly aren't that noticeable. If you are moving large amounts of data back and forward then you will notice it, but generally you really don't pay that big a penalty. That said, would you really be buying a 40GB SSD to be moving large files around in the first place? We think not.
We were extremely impressed with performance in a Raid 0 array on our Intel motherboard. Sure, this configuration still costs a little more than a X25-M 80GB single drive, but the performance benefits are extremely noticeable, especially with sequential reads.
If you are fortunate enough to have plenty of ports and some spare cash, we would imagine that scaling to higher unit drive arrays would be extremely valid, especially to further boost read and write performance for data intensive settings. The costs really wouldn't be that bad either, at under £400 for a four tier drive array. Potential burst transfer read speeds could well be in excess of 800mb/s depending on the controller.
I have been so impressed with these drives that I have just ordered two for one of our gaming test systems on KitGuru, I really can't recommend them higher than that.
KitGuru says: Bargain price drives with huge scaling in multi configuration arrays. Great potential to improve your system speeds for minimal outlay.
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