Conclusion

As a whole the Intel X25-E Server SSD is an astonishing product as far as you don't fill it up to more than 80 percent of its capacity. In this case the performance will collapse regarding sequential reading and random writing.

If we look at the Intel X25-E's writing and reading performance we don't need to spend many words on it. The Intel X25-E shares the performance crown with the X25-M in our test parcours. Both of them are far in front of their counterparts from other manufacturers. And if you look only at writing performance the X25-E partially is in a completely different league with peaks of up to 208 MByte/s!

The average access time of 75 microseconds Intel claims corresponds pretty exactly to what we measured.

When we fill the SSD up to 80 percent and more of its storage capacity the access times are getting suspicious. In this case there occur massive peaks. The access time for one single operation can ascend up to 0.3 seconds! Fortunately this happens only for one single operation. Furthermore we can notice that the access time increases regularly and slow until it becomes a peak. A possible explanation could eventually be found in the wear levelling algorithm which causes a higher load when the SSD is filled with more than 80 percent of its capacity.

These times we recommend a rather unusual solution. If you create a partition table no bigger than 75 percent of the amount of disk space available you shouldn't run into this problem. This means in other words that you left 8 GByte of disk space unformatted.

If you accidentally fill you SSD to more than 80 percent and you want to get the original performance back you'll have to low-level-foramt you drive. Therefore you can download a DOS based program under the following link: Secure Erase

To a price of CHF 609.- you can buy this product at Brack Electronics.

Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch