Received my X-25M, first impressions

[Ph4ZeD]

Yesterday I received my X-25M 80GB after ordering from Scan on Saturday. I thought it would be helpful to those who were debating on whether to take the plunge.

Firstly, the drive is tiny, physically. Its not quite as small as a credit card, but think a couple of credit cards, and its around that size. I'd read that enabling AHCI would increase SSD speeds, which I did on my P5K Premium. However this proved a bit of a mistake as my computer wouldn't boot with my other drives, standard mechanical Samsung F1 drives. I quickly disconnected those two Samsung drives temporarily, which allowed the comp to boot and I installed W7 on the new Intel drive.

I was installing from a USB stick, and the first part of the installation was the same speed as normal, I'm guessing as it was limited due to USB transfer rates. However after the first reset and I removed the USB stick, it was much much faster. It rocketed through the rest of the installation. What was instantly noticeable was the second the desktop appeared, it was usable with no lag whatsoever. On my old Spinpoint F1, when the desktop appeared and you tried to load WoW or something like that, there was a noticeable lag as the HDD tried to catch up.

The formatted capacity is 74
so.4GB, I've installed W7 64-bit Ultimate, Office, Supreme Commander and a number of smaller apps and I still have 40GB free, so I'm not concerned at all about lack of space.

Bootup and shutdown times are lightning fast now, so my first impressions are very positive

[GheeTsar]

Thanks for the review. I'm going to be installing mine this weekend and am looking forward to the benefit.

PS I've read it's best to leave ~20% free space to prevent it from slowing down.

[Disturbedguy]

Can someone please provide a link to this drive?

[markbrown83]

Can someone please provide a link to this drive?

I was a little unsure which one it was on the site too...

[Mossy]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/80GB-...ite-70MB-s-OEM

[Disturbedguy]

Cheers for that Paul, little bit out of my budget for this month..having been paid today and already allocated more than half the money out!.

Possibly next month..no wait thats Christmas month..bah! Maybe SCAN could give me one for hmm..testing purposes?

[BobF64]

I'd read that enabling AHCI would increase SSD speeds, which I did on my P5K Premium. However this proved a bit of a mistake as my computer wouldn't boot with my other drives, standard mechanical Samsung F1 drives.

This is normal if you change from IDE to AHCI mode after installing the OS.

AHCI requires different drivers in Windows and theyre not installed unless you installed in AHCI mode.

Theres a few "bodges" that work on these forums with regard to installing the AHCI drivers before rebooting and changing the option in the BIOS, not everyone has had success though.

[EasterEEL]

This is the Microsoft "bodge" process on how to switch to AHCI after you have installed Windows Vista or 7:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

I am using the same drives (SSD and Samsung) with an Asus P5QPro (so a P45 chipset rather than P35 chipset your motherboard uses). The chipsets are so similar you should be able to enable AHCI which is preferable with Windows 7 and SSD. I would recommend upgrading your motherboard bios to the latest version first. With the P5Q Pro the early bios could not see my DVD Rom with AHCI enabled and this was fixed with a bios update.

Warning when I updated my motherboard bios my Windows 7 RC BSOD on the SSD and in the end I had to re-install Windows.

Also to ensure the SSD remains at peak performance it is essential to enable trim on your SSD which requires a firmware update, but not just yet, see the thread about this or the Hexus main page. Note trim only currently works with the Windows 7 built in storage drivers which do not support raid.

IMHO the best way for you to get maximum performance is to:

Update firmware on SSD to enable trim (when it re-released by Intel)
Update motherboard bios to latest version
Enable AHCI
Re-install Windows 7 from scratch
Don't install Intel® Matrix Storage Drivers until they provide trim support

[bandsaw]

Like Ph4ZeD, I too have just got my mitts on a G2... ooooh, they're a bit good!
With a fresh Win7 Pro x64 install, it goes like it's had it's backside set ablaze. I ran "AS SSD" last night, purely for curiosity reasons, and it claimed a read speed of 277MB/s. Not quite sure that can be right but that's what it said. Coming from a relatively normal HDD past, this is nothing short of amazing IMO.

As I was starting from scratch, I went the AHCI route and, unlike Ph4ZeD, a Samsung F3 worked absolutely fine (board is a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P). I don't think I've seen Windows install quite so quick (used a USB stick) and, as has been said, boot & shut down is certainly somewhat rapid. Not got all my apps (Photoshop, Lightroom, etc) back on yet but so far, I'm chuffed with it. The £170ish I paid is, as stupid as it sounds, well worth it!



Can't fault the Scan guys either!!