Customer Reviews

Intel X18-M Mainstream Solid State Drive - Solid state drive - 80 GB - internal - 1.8" - SATA-300

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This drive provides outstanding performance.

The main caveat to note is that this drive, as a 1.8 inch laptop hard drive, uses a micro-SATA interface. What this means is that if your laptop does not have a micro-SATA connection itself, and only the very newest ones do) then you need a micro-SATA adapter to be able to use this drive with a standard SATA interface (the micro-site standard just uses a smaller power connector because of the lower voltage of these small hard drives). Such adapters are available for around £10. You would then be a will to use this drive with a laptop or PC using their standard SATA connectors.

Now, back to the drive: my previous laptop hard drive, as measured by HD tune, had an average read speed of 40 MB per second, an access time of 18.7 ms and an average CPU usage of 3.9%. In comparison the Intel SSD has an average read speed of 198 MB per second, access time of 0.1 ms and a CPU usage of -1% (yes, minus one, must be an error). When I used TrueCrypt to encrypt the entire disk the average read speed decreased to 89 MB per second (this being how fast my CPU can decrypt data). I don't have data on write speeds.

What this translates to in the real world is a significant decrease in the time for applications to open and close, and for the operating system to boot and shut down and faster file transfers. If you are prepared to spend the money, then you will certainly notice the difference.

Formatted capacity for the 80 GB model comes out at 74.4 GB.

At the time of writing Intel does not have the firmware update utility available to download, so I can't comment on that one.

A reasonably good SSD for the price, however read on to see why such a low rating
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1st one didn't work but received a replacement quickly

However, no adaptor was provided and it requires a special lead to install it - plus no instructions of how to install it or what lead to use.

Took me two months, four wrong leads and loads of searching web sites and shops to get it working.

I will not buy Intel again & suggest that, unless you are 100% sure what you are doing, buy from another company (I've purchased 2 more SSDs form Crucial and they were simple to install)