Legit Storage Reviews

Intel X25-M 160GB 34nm MLC G2 SSD Benchmark Review

Manufacturer: Intel
Product: SSDSA1MH160G2
Date: Thu, Jul 23, 2009 - 12:00 AM
Written By: Nathan Kirsch -
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Performance Degradation Testing

When we first started benchmarking the Intel X25-M 160GB Generation 2 hard drive yesterday, we ran HD Tach first and got the following results on the brand new and never before used drive.

HD Tach Benchmark Results

That benchmark shows the drive as it performs just out of the box with no modifications or files ever being placed on the drive. Just for fun, we ran HD Tach again at the end of testing period and the results were rather shocking.

HD Tach Benchmark Results After Testing

When we reviewed the OCZ Vertex EX 120GB SLC SSD that costs $1299.99 shipped we saw an 11% performance drop in the average read speed and a 65% drop in the average write speed. This performance drop happened just from benchmarking the SSD as these synthetic benchmarks really tear up a drive by repeating the same task across the entire drive. The Intel X25-M with the 34nm MLC Flash has an algorithm in the firmware along with a larger cache, new MLC NAND Flash chips, and a new controller.  It would appear that after a day of doing nothing but benchmarks on the drive, it doesn't suffer from degradation issues like the rest of the drives we have tested on Legit Reviews over the years. When the drive was brand new and just installed it was seen having 230.5MB/s read and 99.7MB/s write averages.  Now that the drive has been through our benchmark gauntlet the performance has decreased down to an average of 225.6MB/s read and 89.8MB/s write. This means we lost just 2% of the original read speed and 9.9% of the original write speed due to drive degradation. Since the Intel SSDSA2M160G2GC firmware doesn't yet support TRIM or the wiper utility, there really is no way to get the drive performance back, but once the TRIM support comes out, it is likely that most of this slight performance drop can be restored.  The second generation Intel X25-M 160GB SSD is hands down one of the best drives on the market today due to how well their algorithm has been written. 

Next Page - Final Thoughts and Conclusions


Review Index
Page 1 - 34nm Flash Meets Intel X25-M 2nd Gen SSDs
Page 2 - Inside The 2nd Generation Intel SSDs
Page 3 - The Test System
Page 4 - HD Tach v3.0.4.0
Page 5 - HD Tune v3.50
Page 6 - HD Tune v3.50 - Random Accesss
Page 7 - SiSoftware Sandra 2009 SP3
Page 8 - CrystalDiskMark v2.2
Page 9 - ATTO Disk Benchmark v2.34
Page 10 - PCMark Vantage
Page 11 - AS SSD Benchmark
Page 12 - Performance Degradation Testing
Page 13 - Final Thoughts and Conclusions