Thank you for the tips Scataphagos. Quite a bit difference between the V and M series. I am wanting to have a SSD for my laptop to boost up the speed.
Supposedly the only difference between the V and M is that the V has less "channels".. less parallelism. (The 80G has a couple fewer channels than the 160 and larger ones, so 160+ is faster at sequential writes.) The new 320 is using a different controller.. one from Marvell. It has been rumored that in the future Intel might use Sandforce controller. I put a V in wife's notebook and it shows a nice pick up in performance. I tried both a V and an 80G M in my desktop... performance seemed the same.
Thanks again Scataphagos. At the beginning of this thread, you referenced USB 3.0. How was that established with your X25-M SSD? The X25-V that I have only has a SATA 3.0 Gbps interface. Does Intel sell X25-M as an external USB V3.0 SSD?
I own an OCZ SSD and the difference it made on my system was drastic. Very happy about the purchase even if it was a bit expensive. Crazy A
I have both a USB 3.0 and a 2.0 "external drive enclosure"... where you can install any kind of 2.5" drive... spinner or SSD. (I tried both a spinner drive and a SSD in the enclosure, and the SSD is MUCH faster... more than 100X faster in small file writes.) "Enclosures" are designed to allow user to change the drive as he wishes. "External drives" often do not allow the drive itself to be changed easily, if at all. I once had an external hard drive which failed. I didn't know whether the box electronics had failed or the drive inside. It was held together with a plastic clip which there was no way to remove except to break it. Turned out that the box had failed and the drive inside will still good... even had some warranty left on the drive which was longer than the original unit. Since then, I've had only "enclosures"... where the box can be easily opened and the drive exchanged if desired. Your X25-V has a "standard SATA connector".... Whether it connects via SATA 1, SATA 2, or SATA 3 is determined by your motherboard port... also, by the design/speed of the drive. A SATA II drive and SATA III drive look exactly the same (or almost exactly the same... SATA III connectors have additional wires over SATA II, so it's likely the SATA III drive also has them built into the connector), but the SATA III is designed to potentially throughput much higher data rate. And in the case of USB external devices, by the device's interface and port to which is mounted.
Haven't seen any Intel ones yet, but other SSD makers have them. You can make yourself a relatively cheap USB 3.0 drive by mounting a SATA II SSD into a "USB 3.0 enclosure". With a used 80G X25-M G2, and an external drive enclosure... maybe $120-$140? I think "external USB 3.0 drives" of comparable size are more... and most are significantly slower. I was hoping that a 40G, X25-V, mounted in a USB 3.0 enclosure would be speedy, but it's not.
Ah! Thanks for filling in the details Scataphagos. What I plan to use a SSD for, I wouldn't need/want to carry it from place to place or from one computer to another. I probably wouldn't need it. I only use USB disk drives for backing up files. For that I leave the job run all night and speed is not that crucial.
SSDs in notebooks usually improve performance noticeably. In a desktop, as a boot drive and to hold frequently run programs gets the best bang for the buck use out of them.
Four Intel X-25V SSD in a raid zero config, using onboard ICHR10 controller which caps me at around 600mb read.