Intel X25-E Extreme Solid State Drive - Solid state drive - 32 GB - internal - 2.5" - SATA-300

Ubuntu boots up so fast i'm going to cry.

Cons.
Btrfs isn't out yet.

The biggest complaint people seem to have had about this drive is the price and capacity. Truth be told, the price is absolutely worth it. How many other components in your system can you migrate to your next system? This is one of those components. You probably invested hundreds of dollars into your RAM and CPU hoping your computer would be faster, perhaps you even setup RAID, but the fact is, whatever you did to upgrade your computer, it's potential is going to waste unless it's sporting one of these drives.

I'll share a rundown of my workstation configuration:

First, I have two of these X25-E drives with RAID in my workstation. Not because I needed the extra speed (one drive is speedy enough) but because I need redundancy. Never know when something will fail, even one of these disks, so that is my personal solution. Windows 7 boots up to the Desktop in 14 seconds from power-on, and most of those 14 seconds is waiting for the BIOS to initiate the other system components.

Second, the 32GB storage is plenty for the operating system (Windows 7), all of my applications including Office and Photoshop, and I still have about 11 GB to spare. For graphics, music, videos, etc., I do not use this drive as storage. I have much cheaper and much larger secondary internal mass storage and external USB mass storage for that. Why waste the high performance SSD on static data, right?

Third, prior to owning this X25-E, I already had an iRAM disk (by GigaByte). Now, it isn't nearly as spacious, but it did it's job. I've re-attached it as tertiary storage and moved my Windows paging file, TEMP folders, and Photoshop scratch files here. The system already performed well without doing this, but now I feel I'm getting even more money's worth from both the iRAM and the SSD in terms of longevity and wear. (I am considering HyperOS's HyperDrive 5M for editing larger Photoshop and 3D rendering scratch space, but I digress.)

Fourth, not only does this SSD use less power and is quiet, but it also caused my workstation fans to slow down from the reduction of internal temperature. There's even less noise and heat emanating from the box now, plus the cooler flowing air is healthier for the video card and iRAM drive, is it not?

Last, but not least, I've tested MTRON Pro (search "Battleship MTRON" for testing on these disks by NLH) and RunCore drives which claim similar capability as this X25-E. Their claims are not so accurate. In fact, the MTRON disks died within 6 months (3 out of 4!!) and the RunCore tended to lock up the GUI during huge write operations. I'd recommened the RunCore only for *netbook* upgrades because of form-factor, but I'll be upgrading my *laptop* with an X25-E for sure, especially now that they're available in 64GB capacities.

I guarantee if you use this disk, you WILL NOT BE UNHAPPY. As with any storage, though, it can fail and backups are your ONLY recourse for unique data -- so do it. This is merely best practice as there isn't, and has never been, a magical data unicorn to save us from hardware failure.

I've been using one of these for about 6 months now and I must say it's amazing. The snappiness of applications on starting up is fantastic. It is a bit of a pain to have to offload a lot of things to slower storage, but it's made development on this system a breeze!

I'd give it 4.5 stars just because of the price, but otherwise it's been good to me.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 8 reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars