Conclusion

Compared to the X25-m of the first generation the X25-m with 34 nm NAND Flash memory the second generation definitely is an upgrade. As long as you don't fill the drive to its top especially the reading performance is blisteringly fast. Also if you write 4 KByte blocks randomly the new X25-m is much quicker than anything else we've tested yet. Also very reasonable is the fact that you can upgrade the drives firmware even when Windows is installed. This makes it relatively easy to get even more performance out of the drive with future firmware upgrade.

As soon as we look at the sequential writing performance with bigger blocks the Intel X25-m isn't able to score much more than 85 MByte/s. At this point we would wish that the X25-m could keep up with MLC drives from other manufacturers, because in certain benchmarks we therefore can see performance differences from up to 100 percent and more. But again at this point we have to underline the IOPS strength the X25-m shows us here which Intel was able to improve again compared to its predecessor.

Meanwhile the X25-m also comes with a very competitive price per Gigabyte compared to other drives on the market. Therefore you nowadays have to pay about CHF 3.37 (ca. EUR 2.25) per Gigabyte. If we look at an OCZ Vertex drive with 120 GByte - a dricet competitor - its price per Gigabyte is about CHF 3.71 (ca. EUR 2.47). If you're looking for reasons why the price of Intel X25-m dropped so massively within one year it is mostly down to the competition which became much harder and also because of the improved manufacturing process which allows Intel to physically put less memory chips on the PCB but with a higher storage densitiy. 

The Intel X25-m Gen2 34nm can be bought at Digitec to a price of CHF 499.- (est. EUR 333.-).

Authors: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch and m.seiler@ocaholic.ch