Thanksgiving is right around the corner and most of us are probably getting out our Black Friday lists and hoping that the electronics we want become really cheap. For most tech upgrades you can already see Newegg and Tiger Direct advertise November sales even before Black Friday as well. Well if you are still running a regular hard drive in your system and are too cheap to upgrade to an SSD. We have a great product that will allow you to upgrade your PC and not break your bank.
The Intel X25-M 120GB SSD is one of the older Solid State Drives but it still packs a lot of performance with a good amount extra space as well. And as always with SSDs, your computer will turn on much faster and applications will load faster even if they are installed your secondary hard drive. Unlike the Kingston KC100 SSDNow we reviewed previously, the Intel X25-M 120GB SSD is geared towards average consumers and will not cost that much. Now let’s take a look and see what comes inside the box with this great product from Intel.
Package Contents
- Intel X25-M 120GB SSD
- 2.5’’ USB Enclosure
- 3.5’’ Brackets and Mounting Screws
- SATA Power and Data Cable
- Intel SATA Solid State Drive Warranty and Installation Guide CD
- Speed Demon Sticker
It also comes with an Intel SSD Toolbox with Intel SSD Optimizer which provides a set of applications to easily manage the health and optimize the performance of your Intel SSD. The toolbox includes a powerful set of management tools, information, and diagnostic tools. The Intel SSD Optimizer utilizes the new ATA Data Set Management Command (Trim Attribute) to help maintain your SSDs performance and extended use of the drive. This will help it retain its out of the box speeds even after months of use.
X25-M Performance
Now it comes to the big question for SSDs, is it worth my hard earned money upgrading my old computer with an SSD drive. In my opinion it’s a definitely going to be a great increase in performance in any computer your install it in whether it becomes a boot drive in a desktop or just replaces your old hard drive in your laptop. Your computer will definitely turn on much faster and load applications quicker. Solid State Drives also have Trim which allows them to retain their disk space even after extended use. Just make sure you don’t go defragging your SSD because this will actually lower the amount of space in your SSD.
As you can see in the performance charts, this drive just completely obliterates the Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive in transfer speeds and boot time. Of course SSDs are optimized for this types of situations but it’s definitely an amazing upgrade when you experience it in person. Just watching your computer turn on and be usable in 30 seconds or less is pretty sweet. And you can also see that even though the Kingston KC100 SSDNow has a much faster transfer speed, it had around the same amount of boot time as the Intel X25-M SSD. This would benefit many people that just want to purchase a SSD for a boot drive in order to turn on their computer faster without having to spend a lot of money to do it.
I would definitely recommend only installing your OS on the hard drive because 120GB is still not much space to play around with. After installing Windows 7 Ultimate and updating all the drives I only had about 75 GB left of free space. And overtime as there are more updates it will get smaller so it’s not good to overload the boot drive with unnecessary applications. However, if you plan to install the select few programs that you want to load faster, you will see a great improvement of speed. Whether it’s on the SSD or being loaded from the extra hard drive, the boot up time for applications is increased regardless. I think that’s definitely another great reason SSDs are a great way to upgrade your computer.
