The hard drive is, without question, the slowest component in a modern computer. The high performance and low power consumption promised by solid state disks have been tempting users who love to multitask but hate waiting while their hard drives spin and their hair turns gray. But the high prices charged for modest performance gains have made them think twice. Enter the Intel X25-M, a game-changing SSD that justifies its premium cost by offering twice the read speed of its closest competitor.    

The Potential of the Intel X25-M

Like a normal hard drive, the 2.5-inch X25-M, also available in a 1.8-inch form factor as the X18-M, attaches to a SATA II port, making it compatible with just about any notebook. Unlike a hard drive or any other notebook SSD, Intel's first foray into the storage market promises an unheard of read rate of 250 MBps, when even the best high-performance SSDs claim no more than 120 MBps and the typical 5,400-rpm hard drive delivers less than 45 MBps.

With that kind of read speed, a seek time of less than 1ms, and a respectable write speed of 70 MBps, the X25-M is fast enough to keep pace with the CPU and eliminate a great deal of the time users spend waiting for that dreaded hourglass to disappear. Also, because it has no moving parts and completes tasks more quickly, the X25-M promises notebooks significantly longer battery life.

Drives made with MLC memory, the type of NAND Flash used in the X25-M, traditionally have had two disadvantages: slower performance and shorter life expectancy. However, Intel has redesigned the drive's firmware and controller to offer both better performance and write endurance capable of handling 100GB per day of writes for 5 years. Since, according to Intel, the average user writes only 4 to 5GB per day, the drive should last much longer than the computer in which it's installed.