Ultimate Edition Forum

Reviewed By: jpiszcz on 11/27/2008
Rating + 5Rating + 5Rating + 5Rating + 5Rating + 5
Tech Level Tech Level: high - Ownership: less than 1 day
This user purchased this item from Newegg

Pros: Fastest, lowest latency device I have used for primary storage besides maybe a ramdisk. When I got the SSD, it showed 54 hours of usage and 66 power cycles, I assume this is testing at the factory, in any case, this is what the smart stats look like and some basic dd speed tests, as shown in the techreport review, write speed is quite fast, 227MiB/s. The machine used to take about 60-70 seconds to boot, it now takes about 5-6 seconds. When opening browsers etc, I no longer hear my (previously) 750 gig disk grinding away loading all the libraries, everything is instantaneous. I am happy I waited for the X25-E SSD as it has much better write performance (~227MiB/s vs. 70MiB/s with the X25-M) and its also SLC; it should last longer than a traditional MLC SSD. Overall, a great product.
Cons: Price, but worth every penny.

# hddtemp /dev/sda
WARNING: Drive /dev/sda doesn't seem to have a temperature sensor.
WARNING: This doesn't mean it hasn't got one.
WARNING: If you are sure it has one, please contact me ([email protected]).
WARNING: See --help, --debug and --drivebase options.
/dev/sda: SSDSA2SH032G1GN INTEL: no sensor

Disk is 32 gigabytes, or around ~30GB formatted.
Other Thoughts: # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/sda: 32.0 GB, 32000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3890 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Incase you are wondering, both disks are using no barriers.

time to decompress kernel tree (linux, xfs):

$ /usr/bin/time tar xf linux-2.6.27.7.tar
Total bytes read: 293857280 (281MiB, 75MiB/s)
0.15user 1.12system 0:03.74elapsed 34%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+645minor)pagefaults 0swaps

The same thing on a 750 gigabyte hdd:

$ /usr/bin/time tar xf linux-2.6.27.7.tar
Total bytes read: 293857280 (281MiB, 6.5MiB/s)
0.15user 1.22system 0:43.29elapsed 3%CPU (0avgtext+0avgdata 0maxresident)k
0inputs+0outputs (0major+643minor)pagefaults 0swaps

I used a 1MB blocksize but newegg bans that phrase in the command so I removed it (blocksize=1M):

write speed:
# dd if=/dev/zero of=1gigabyte count=1024
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.71984 s, 227 MB/

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