Intel SSD 80 GB review

The sleek 2.5'' Intel 80 GB hard disk is not only portable, but performs well

too. The test bed included the MSI 790 FX motherboard, AMD Phenom II X4 955 (3.2

GHz) Processor, 4GB Corsair DDR3 RAM and the ATI Radeon 5700 graphics card. We

used Windows 7 Ultimate edition during our tests. The Intel SSD showed transfer

speeds of up to 108 MB/sec with an access time of 0.5 milliseconds which was

promptly mentioned by the HD Tune benchmark. When copying 100 MB of data from a

pen drive to the Intel SSD, it took us 18 secs. The same data took 27 secs when

transferred from the SSD to the pen drive. The stop clock beeped 3 secs when the

same data was being transferred from the SSD to a spindle based regular hard

disk. The reverse process took less than a second.

We employed a new benchmark named Passmark to check the power consumption and

found that while an average hard disk drained out a fully charged laptop in 2hrs

and 30 mins, the SSD-based laptop lasted 5 hrs under similar conditions,

indicating that Intel SSD consumes only half the power as compared to a regular

hard Disk.

Bottomline: A convenient data storage medium which is bound to become

popular with falling prices.

Shikhar Mohan Gupta