Intel X-25M 80GB $209.99 Shipped - Ends 3-10

SJetski71 said:
NP at all.

But yea, we had been talking about the oem drive all along (keeping in spirit of the thread). Didn't notice that it was the retail drive you were looking for.
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ha ha ha, That explains it.
So to simplify this process. the only thing you would have to do is search for circuit city; get the 15% cb find the drive on site and place order.

K, I do not fee so stupid now:p
 
INFRNL said:
So to simplify this process. the only thing you would have to do is search for circuit city; get the 15% cb find the drive on site and place order.
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Maybe for the retail drive, but for the oem if you want to get an additional $10 discount then you'd have to follow the extra steps we posted.

Doing it your way the base price of the drive comes up as $250. Whereas if you do it the long way we posted, then the base price of the drive comes up as $240...an extra $10 discount before Bing cashback is even applied ($203 vs $213)

Just checked, i don't think circuitcity has the retail version (?)
 
here is direct search for circuit city with 15% cashback. Hopefully it shows properly. I did an intel ssd search within circuit city site. shows oem $240, ret $250
direct link
Did not have to go long route.
ZZF has the retail for $230-$15 rebate-$10 using ebillme retail drive
or ewiz: $230-$20 instant-3%cb=$203.70 OEM drive. ewiz oem

Bottom line: ZZF is probably the best deal as you get a Retail drive with adapter for $205 after all is said and done. Possible cashback as well measly 2%
Ewiz is the cheapest up front price of $210, but would have to get adapter if chosen to.

I do not recall what the warranty is on the OEM drives. I wanna say its the same as retail. will have to double check
 
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Bah i still have a G1 and paid 280 for it... About 4 months ago. heh. Just goes to show this stuff really can go down in price. Man would i love to get another one. Something tells me i wont see a difference, these drive are crazy fast and its awesome.
 
Warrior said:
Bah i still have a G1 and paid 280 for it... About 4 months ago. heh. Just goes to show this stuff really can go down in price. Man would i love to get another one. Something tells me i wont see a difference, these drive are crazy fast and its awesome.
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So you are happy with your gen 1 drive? what do you do to keep it running optimal? I am in a toss up between this gen 2 drive and the dane/intel gen 1 drive. Not sure which way to go:confused:
 
Today's the last day if you're interested in the oem deal. there's also a good chance that these drives will drop even more since i just ordered one. lol
 
To be honest I'm not blown away by mine. I got the X25-M for my desktop and the X25-V for my netbook and neither have impressed me all that much. Especially the netbook. I guess the Atom really bottlenecks everything.

As far as my desktop goes, things don't load all that much faster coming from my vanilla 7200RPM WD Blue drive. Obviously the benchmarks are much much better but it really doesn't feel it. My 8GB of RAM and Superfetch did a great job helping out my slow HDD.
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criccio said:
To be honest I'm not blown away by mine. I got the X25-M for my desktop and the X25-V for my netbook and neither have impressed me all that much. Especially the netbook. I guess the Atom really bottlenecks everything.

As far as my desktop goes, things don't load all that much faster coming from my vanilla 7200RPM WD Blue drive. Obviously the benchmarks are much much better but it really doesn't feel it. My 8GB of RAM and Superfetch did a great job helping out my slow HDD.
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
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Did you do the tweaks? Not all but the important ones. The netbook is understandable but what are you running in your desktop? Did you enable AHCI? Disable defrag, indexing on C, enable write caching, and all that junk. Something isn't right, even my OCZ drive I am blown away. Windows 7 navigation feels like a stripped down XP, things load extremely fast, not to mentioning virus scans full speed ahead :D
 
Yes yes and yes. It is nice and fast but I'm just not blown away.

Untitled-131.png


This is with AHCI disabled. Seems slower then everyone else's and its brand spanking new.

EDIT

Ok, I turned AHCI mode on and it improved:

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I bought two, tried to use them with the new Gigabyte 850SB board and the latest bios F4.

In raid mode it wont even see the Intels, in AHCI mode it sees them but Win7 refuses to install on either one... assumiong something the BIOS is telling Win7 is all farked up.

Even the seperate onboard sata2 controller sees them in raid or ahci but again, Win7 won't load onto them.

Took the drives over to my other system... Gigabyte 790GX/750SB DDR2 board, and it sees the drives just fine in raid and Win7 installs on them just fine.

Virtually identical bios, but something about the new board just can't hack these G2 Intels.

Hopefully they will have a bios fix soon. System still awaits the 480GTX arrival, so I'm not in a hurry. The Gigabyte is great, the new 965BE-C3 is doing 3.8Ghz at stock voltage and prime stable with 8Gigs of OCZ 1600 DDR3 Reapers.

Oh yeah, in raid 0 on the 790GX the 2 G2's ATTO at 479MB/s ;-)

I have a WD640GB AALS as well, with Win7 installed no problem AHCI on the Sata3 controller. Installed, apps running, etc. So the disk problem is truly just about the disk-v-bios/raid-bios.
 
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Great deal. SSD haters (yes they exist they just dont have the nerve to say it), believe the hype.

My G2 160GB is amazing, but my X25V 40GB made a bigger impact in my laptop.. the slower your machine (if you're "waiting to buy a SSD when you upgrade"), the MORE reason you have to buy
 
housecat said:
My G2 160GB is amazing, but my X25V 40GB made a bigger impact in my laptop.. the slower your machine (if you're "waiting to buy a SSD when you upgrade"), the MORE reason you have to buy
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Don't agree. I got the X25-V for my netbook and I haven't noticed much of a difference at all. Its still dead slow... :p

Boot times improved and so did benchmarks but those are kinda useless.

Now the 80GB in my workstation truly did make a difference.
 
INFRNL said:
So you are happy with your gen 1 drive? what do you do to keep it running optimal? I am in a toss up between this gen 2 drive and the dane/intel gen 1 drive. Not sure which way to go:confused:
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You can either use something like HDDErase or if your like me and cant get that program to work for anything on any computer then you can use DBAN and use the "Write Zeros, 1 Pass" option to zero out all the cells.

Now before you do this, you'll need a program that can image the entire drive to a image file or another drive. I use Ghost and have a spare 160GB disk drive that I image my Patriot SSD to, zero out the Patriot and then reimage back. Windows usually complains that it wants the disc to repair the install, but comes back up after that everytime.

Now personally I would recommend a TRIM drive for sure, because the refreshing thing while I accepted it as being part of the "new" crowd, it definently is a hassle. It was good from an educational point of view, but not something the average user wants to dick around with.
 
^If you unplug the drive and hook it up to a usb adapter HDDErase should work.
 
westrock2000 said:
Also be aware that Intel just released the newest version of their Rapid Storage Technology Driver and its *supposed* to support TRIM through RAID. Currently 2x80GB G2's are cheaper then 1 160GB G2.
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This is not correct. It supports trim while the controller is in RAID mode, but not for drives that are member disks for the RAID array.

Here are my 80GB G1's in RAID:

cdm3x18mr0.png


I didn't take a crystaldiskmark bench of my G2 in my laptop.
 
criccio said:
Don't agree. I got the X25-V for my netbook and I haven't noticed much of a difference at all. Its still dead slow... :p

Boot times improved and so did benchmarks but those are kinda useless.

Now the 80GB in my workstation truly did make a difference.
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What's your chipset? I'm guessing the storage controller that my Intel 965m chipset uses is vastly superior to whatever is in your notebook. Does it support AHCI? Passing TRIM commands successfully? I'm actually running mine in IDE myself, but the controller used makes a huge difference.
For example, initial tests of SATA6gb controllers show they can still be beaten by genuine Intel SATA3gb controllers in many, if not most benchmarks. So optimization matters.

You just need a laptop with a capable controller or might have other, software based, problems. I doubt, very much, that it's your Intel SSD considering you're on a Netbook.
 
WarlordOne said:
This is not correct. It supports trim while the controller is in RAID mode, but not for drives that are member disks for the RAID array.
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Ya, thats why I said it as *supposed*. The drivers JUST came out this weekend and Intel is not saying much so far so ppl are trying to figure out whats working and not.

But here is the wording from the Driver notes

Note
Trim support is provided for all volume types except RAID 5, as long as all the solid state disks (SSDs) included in the volume meet ATA-8 protocal requirements.
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To me that specifically says "all the disks <meaning more then 1> in the volume <meaning RAID> can be trimmed"
 
housecat said:
What's your chipset? I'm guessing the storage controller that my Intel 965m chipset uses is vastly superior to whatever is in your notebook. Does it support AHCI? Passing TRIM commands successfully? I'm actually running mine in IDE myself, but the controller used makes a huge difference.
For example, initial tests of SATA6gb controllers show they can still be beaten by genuine Intel SATA3gb controllers in many, if not most benchmarks. So optimization matters.

You just need a laptop with a capable controller or might have other, software based, problems. I doubt, very much, that it's your Intel SSD considering you're on a Netbook.
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Its a GMA945 with an ICH7. The BIOS is extremely limited and I see no option for AHCI mode. FWIW, the Intel SSD Toolbox "SSD Optimizer" was able to run.
 
I hope they do include RAID TRIM, but it says nothing specifically about that, just that intels drivers are coming out soon.
 
Just bought the Intel X25-V 40GB for $109.99 shipped using the coupon from Ewiz.. Going in my laptop, and the 250 gig from the laptop is going into my PS3..
 
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