Intel X-25M G2 160 GB SSD
Solid State Disks (SSD) are the future! I hereby declare that if you own equities in Western Digital, Seagate or any other platter based hard disk company, you better sell it quick because they are in trouble!
The hard disk market has been the last remaining bastion of “new old-tech” that has not seen true revolution since the dawn of modern computers. By far, it is the slowest and the least reliable part of a computer. When I buy a computer, I know that I will more than likely end up having to replace the hard drive.
My new technology obsession is the SSD. The price has come down to a point where a mortal enthusiast can afford one now for a mere price of a leg (not the two like it used to be). With Snow Leopard being released, I decided to take my new SSD for a spin. The undisputed king of SSDs at the moment is the Intel X-25M. The second generation (G2) came out not too long ago. With absolutely no moving parts, zero seek time and insane random read/write speeds, this thing just screams along. Here are some videos.
Please excuse the shaky camera work and the horrible video quality. I was using my left hand to record (I’m right handed) and the video is from an old, antiquated digital camera that’s just teetering on death.
For the first video. I went into the Applications folder, selected bunch of applications, and opened them up all at once at the same time. This is a new video I made with Quicktime X’s screen recording feature — new in Snow Leopard. I felt compelled to make a new presentable video after getting way too many complaints about the horrible quality of the first video.
The second video shows me opening Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and SoundBooth at once at the same time. If I had done this on a normal HDD, the HDD would have thrashed into tomorrow.
The third video shows boot time from a completely shut down state. The timer starts as soon as I press the power button. The stop watch is hard to see due to the darkness and my crappy camera, but you can catch a glimpse of the final time towards the end of the video. For this video, I made a makeshift tripod out of my chair a coffee table after receiving complaints about motion sickness.
The final two videos shows the boot up and program start up time from my old HDD. It’s painfully slow.
Program start up video from a regular hard disk.
I’m Sold!
After having only used this for a day, I can conclusively say that I don’t think I will ever go back to normal hard disks again. I believe that SSD is a revolutionary advancement in hard drive technology. When it comes to user interface performance, responsiveness (snappiness) and perception is everything. The number of IO operations per second this SSD can handle is impressive. It doesn’t matter what I throw at it, programs just load up in an instant.
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