Intel X25-V: Ssd at a low price measures up

Ever since it was first released, Intel’s solid state drive X25-M has been absolutely top class. It has a high top speed and a smoothness across the entire address field that initially no competitor came close to. Over time, the competition got better, but Intel is still the manufacturer everyone else has to measure up against.

However, the disk is relatively expensive, and many manufacturers have invested in releasing budget disks instead. Last fall, Kingston was the first to come out with a 40 gigabyte ssd under a thousand, and a handful of others have since done the same.

Therefore, it is extra interesting that Intel is now entering the same price war with its new X25-V. How do they stand up to the competition in the budget quagmire?

Pushes the price
Yes, we don’t need to worry. This is a really good counter. It’s 40 gigabytes in size, which means it has room for Windows and a handful of installed programs, but if you’re going to start storing a lot of large media files, you’ll have to do it elsewhere. With a price of quite precisely the thousand Swedish kroner, it gives a cost per gigabyte of SEK 25. That’s about the same as you pay per gigabyte for the 32 gigabyte drives from Kingston, Samsung and A-data.

The maximum speed when reading is really good. We get numbers when sequentially reading data over 200 MB/s. It happens when the disk needs to do minimal address searches, when refueling large individual files. Random read, which is most of what you normally do, is still at a high 128 MB/s for one megabyte files.

Above all, we can state that Intel once again makes the most consistently performing solid state disk. Often performance on an ssd can be uneven depending on which memory addresses you want to read, but not here.

Weaker at writing
The write speed of the X25-V is not as amazing. Around 42 MB/s most of the time and with individual measurements down to 20-25 MB/s when testing the entire memory circuit. It’s still good, but here there are other discs that play in the same division or are a bit better.

A good thing about the X25-V is that it has a so-called Trim function. This means that it has a better opportunity to optimize the data on the disk, something that primarily affects write performance on a disk that has been used for a while and has little storage space left. It’s something you don’t often see on cheaper counters.

The drive comes in a package with an installation manual on a CD, screws for mounting and an adapter to attach it to a 3.5 inch hard drive bay. No program for system transfer, which Kingston and Apacer ship with, among others, is not available here. Not sending printed instructions also feels stingy, especially since a common use for this disk is to upgrade a notebook PC, which may not even have a CD drive.

X25-V 40GB
Manufacturer: Intel, www.intel.com
Format: 2.5 inches
Memory type: MLC NAND Flash
Interface: Set 300
Stated MTBF: 1.2 million hours
Approx price: 1000 crowns
Guarantee: 3 years

Plus: Fast read, good price, Trim support
Minus: Lack of installation help
Grade: (8 out of 10)

X25-V 40 GB