The OCZ Colossus uses the standard 3.5″ SATA chassis, meaning it’s an easy plug-in for contemporary desktops. Unfortunately, that’s too big for most laptops, which usually accept only 2.5″ drive modules. The relative heftiness of the Colossus has something to do with its built-in RAID 0 architecture, implying that there are actually multiple SSDs working in tandem inside the unit to boost read and write speeds.

Unfortunately, you have to pay to play. Prices are $438, $820, and $1530 for the 128GB, 256GB, and 512GB variants respectively. The 1TB version retails for a whopping $3837, according to XBitLabs.

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Courtesy Intel

You’re probably wondering why you should spend $485 on a drive that can only hold 160GB of data. Well, solid state disks are known more for their read and write speeds, rather than the affordability. And in terms of speed, it seems nothing matches Intel’s flagship SSD offering for now.

In any case, the Intel X25-M line represents significant improvements over the X25-E models. Simply put, the newer Intel solid state disks operate much faster, at literally half the price. The 160GB X25-E for instance retailed for over $900!

As mentioned above, NewEgg currently carries the X25-M, the 160GB version, for $485. If you’ve got a lower price, feel free to hit the comments below.

Buy 160GB Intel X25-M SSD (SSDSA2MH160G1)

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Courtesy Tom's Hardware

The financially frivolous exercise (see prices below) was Tom’s Hardware US’s response to an email by Samsung’s PR agency, which apparently showcased a RAID array of 24 Samsung PB22-J flash SSDs achieving 2.12GB/s. Looks like Samsung needs to come out with something new!

Despite the unofficial 2.23GB/s throughput (read/write performance) record, the tech-heads at TH weren’t completely satisfied. With an average claimed speed of 200MB/s per individual drive, hooking up 16 X25-Es should’ve produced a throughput of 3.2GB/s. Ah, but despite applying “all optimizations”—including the use of two drive controller cards to overcome PCIe x8’s limitation of 2GB/s—sometimes the rest of a computer simply can’t keep up with an awesome setup.

Product Links and Prices:

• Adaptec 2244300-R PCI Express SATA / SAS 5805 Controller Card – $519.99
• Intel X25-E 64GB 2.5″ SSD – $669

Yes, ladies and gentlmen, Tom’s setup was worth $9,000!

Source

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Courtesy Intel

But Intel discovered a hiccup with the new drives, asking retailers to put all deliveries on hold, and to actually pull the X25-Ms from their respective store fronts. William George of Puget Systems narrates what happened:

After several hours of waiting on Intel’s tech folks I am now pleased to be able to relay to our customers the status of the Intel drives. There is a defect in the units which causes data corruption if – and only if – a password is set on the drive in the system BIOS… and then changed or disabled later. Initially we were told this might require a complete reworking of the drives, and that those we had gotten in were effectively unusable, but Intel was able to work out a firmware fix for the problem. That won’t be available immediately, but should be showing up in about two weeks.

Ultimately not a big disaster—especially since Intel was able to catch the problem relatively quickly, probably before customers were able to discover it for themselves.

In any case, for those who already have an X25-M, George was helpful enough to share a link to the updated firmware, available here.

Source

More about the new SSDs: Intel’s new 34nm SSDs cut prices by 60 percent, boost speed

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Stay tuned for updates: apparently by disabling on-drive compression, the read-write process can go a lot faster. (jkkmobile.blogspot.com)

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