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Product: Intel SSDSA2MH080G2R5 Amazon Price: Too low to display Availability: In Stock |
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I also have a G1 version of this drive and it’s literally life-changing (I use the SSD drive in my work laptop). It’s amazingly fast!!! If you notice your laptop or desktop to be accessing your harddisk a lot of time then you will see tremendous speed performance with this drive. It’s the best performance upgrade you can have in your laptop.
In terms of the drive’s life expectancy, the main factor is the amount of writes you do to the drive. On a normal daily-laptop-work usage then the drive will last >15 years. You can actually calculate this since the number of write cycles is tracked in the drive via the S.M.A.R.T attributes. So you can calculate when the drive will gonna die. Intel did a wonderful job in write amplification and wear-levelling algorithm. Thus, it will be obsolete before it reaches the maximum rated write cycles.
If you are a techie, then check out the following links:
Detailed intel spec sheet on the drives:
http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/index.htm
All you need to know about ssd drives (31-page anandtech thesis):
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1
X25M Gen2 review:
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17269/1
I have the G1 version of this drive. It made an amazing performance boost to my Lenovo Thinkpad. Boot times are amazing and recover from hibernation is instant! Photoshop cs4 loads in about 4 seconds! It was super fast under Vista Ultimate, but when I moved to Win 7 Ultimate (now RTM) it is crazy!
Intel took some flack due to some potential flash fragmentation impacting performance in some cases. I never saw it, but I upgraded my drive firmware just in case. It took about 1 min.
This G2 drive listed by Amazon should be even faster, especially on writes. NOTE, be sure to check for firmware versions when you get this drive as Intel might have updated. There was an issue with the G2 drives if you use a boot password – BE VERY CAREFUL TO CHECK THE FIRMWARE IF YOU HAVE A BOOT PASSWORD.
If you like speed, buy this thing. Beats buying a hot, noisy, slow 7200rpm drive!
Let’s get this out of the way first – this is not about capacity. Most everyone knows a 500GB 2.5″ 7200RPM notebook hard drive can be had for less than half the price of this SSD. I swapped out this very 500GB 2.5″ hard drive for this Intel 80GB SSD. Make sure you buy the G2 version which has TRIM support (enabled with firmware update from Intel) with no worries in performance degradation.
With this SSD, my laptop feels more responsive than my Intel Core i7 *desktop* computer. Windows 7 cold boots in about 35 seconds (from after BIOS POST to wifi ready and web browser open, with anti-virus and firewall installed). The hard drive is the highest rated component in my laptop – 6 for the CPU (Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4GHz), *7.8* for the hard drive (7.9 is the maximum score in Windows 7). Not just in actual use, installing Windows and other programs is also much faster. I have never seen programs install so fast before – Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installed in about 10 minutes from a USB drive.
If you’re shopping for a new laptop, forget the very expensive CPU upgrades for an extra few hundred MHz which you probably can’t appreciate in everyday use. Stick with the base CPU (Core 2 Duo preferably), spend that money on this SSD. The speed increase with this SSD will be much more dramatic than having an extra few hundred megahertz.