Intel X25-M 80GB SSD, Intel Ups The Ante
HD Tach Testing
Simpli Software's HD Tach is described on the company's web site as such: "HD Tach is a low level hardware benchmark for random access read/write storage devices such as hard drives, removable drives, flash devices, and RAID arrays. HD Tach uses custom device drivers and other low level Windows interfaces to bypass as many layers of software as possible and get as close to the physical performance of the device being tested."
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If you're the kind that likes to look at pretty line graphs, then these HD Tach tests will tickle your NAND-gate to be sure. Without even clicking through to the larger version images, you can see a very pronounced performance characteristic of the Intel SSD. Simply put, Intel's X25-M has the most consistent, glitch-free performance of any drive we tested here, including even the VelociRaptor, which shows the traditional tail off in performance as the drive has to access data at the outer perimeter of its platters.
Then, looking closer at the numbers, we see Intel's performance trend continues, with the X25-M SSD trouncing all comers in read performance by a huge margin, two times that of the 10K RPM VelociRaptor hard drive. On the write side of the ball, Intel's bandwidth consistency pays off and the Intel MLC-based SSD actually even outpaces the OCZ SLC-based drive by a small percentage.