Both Anandtech and Toms hardware (and probably more, but these are the ones i have read so far) have gotten their hands on the Intel X25-M SSD drive. I dont feal comfortable calling them “Hard Drives” because are they really? Anyway, reading the reviews, some things have poped out, which i will go though here. 

  • Price: They aint cheap! $600 give or take for 80Gb…. 
  • Life Span: OEMs wanted the drives to cope with 20Gb of writes every day for 5+ years. Intel over delivered: 100GB of writes over 5 years! Or, to put another way, 1Gb a day for 100 years! could be very nice for backups!
  • incase of bad blocks in the memory, intel are including an extra 6-6.5Gb of storage (7.5 – 8% of 80gb) incase you start running out of good blocks. nice feature! the reserved space can be increesed also, so, in theory, you could bring the usable space to, say, 64Gb and have a total of 24.5Gb for “backup”. more at Anadtech’s article.
  • in theory, it should know when it will fail, and there are inteligant things around this. the Anadtech article has more on that.
  • Speed: These things are FAST!

i currently have 2 Raptors in my Mac Pro, and was thinking of the Workstation+1 (what will end up replacing the Mac Pro one day) and originally i though a couple of of the new Velociraptos would do the job. Now i am thinking a couple of these instead! :)