Testbed and Methods

The following testing utilities were used:

• IOMeter 2003.02.15
• WinBench 99 2.0
• FC-Test 1.0
• PCMark 2004
• PCMark 2005
• IOMark 0.30b14

Testbed configuration:

• ASUS P5WDG2 WS Pro mainboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E2160
• IBM DTLA-307015 system disk, 15GB
• Radeon X600 graphics card
• 1GB DDR2-800 SDRAM
• Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2

We installed the generic OS drivers for the drives and formatted them in FAT32 and NTFS as one partition with the default cluster size. For some tests 32GB partitions were created on the drives and formatted in FAT32 and NTFS with the default cluster size, too. The drives were connected to a Promise SATA300 TX4302 controller installed into a PCI-X slot. The HDDs were switched from the quiet mode (with Advanced Acoustic Management enabled) into the ordinary operating mode when necessary. The SAS interface was provided by an LSI SAS3041E-R controller. Of course, the drives are all tested with enabled AHCI (by the way, Intel strongly recommends turning it on).

Unfortunately, this review is just our “first date” with the new device. We didn’t have enough time to test our Intel X-25M in all of our traditional tests, particularly in IOMeter’s Database pattern, in PCMark Vantage, and in power consumption tests. We are going to make our amends for this omission in future reviews where we will test Intel’s SSDs in much more tests.