Intel® - X25-M Mainstream 160GB Internal Serial ATA Solid State Hard Drive

This is an excellent drive. Fast boot, fast program launch, fast everything. This is a premium drive, and you will pay a premium price for it. If that's what your looking for, it is well worth it. My windows experience index went from 6.2 with two western digital velociraptors in RAID0 to 7.6 with this SSD. If you want the perks, but don't want to pay for the 160gb, buy the 40gb for $130, use it as your boot drive, and get a separate storage drive.

This is an awesome drive. Super fast and one of the best SSD's out there. There may be faster drives however this Intel has a cult following because it's solid and it's very well rounded. Shipping did however take forever since it was free. About a week total and 2 days of that was for BestBuy to process the order. As a bonus I received a Free mini-mag lite, pen and sticker that all say Intel on them "Speed Demon". Pretty nifty if you ask me as I wasn't expecting it! I have such faith in these Intel drives, I bought my wife an 80GB on sale last week while I bought the 160GB version. We'll both use these as OS drives and have the 1TB drives for music, movies, photos et cetera.

Look ahead of time to make sure your computer can support the SATA 3.0 speed (around 220mg/sec on sata 3.0). My Laptop only supported the Sata 1.5 so I ended up only getting the 150mg/sec the interface allows for, which was 2.5x faster than my WD 5400rpm drive. Thats not what really showcases this drive for myself, its the seek time. 0.1us seek time.. my WD drive was nearly 20us and that is what makes these drives rock! Windows 7 core load was 20mins with this drive on my 2ghz dual core dell studio. Boot time turned into under 30 seconds with internet up, out of sleep mode less than 2 seconds.

What else can I say but these drives are superfast. If you value speed then SSD is the way to go. I have 5 of these. The one in my notebook changed boot time from 1:15 down to less than 20 seconds. I have four of the 80GB Intel SSDs in raid zero in my home workstation and the time to render video has been cut by 25% when compared to my previous raid zero setup running four 300GB WD 10K RPM drives. Remember you are trading speed for size. If you need a huge storage space look at standard hard drives. If you need speed and have the cash go with SSD. As always remember to backup your computer - as all hard drives can crash.

Put this in my old duo core gateway laptop, installed quick, loaded up programs now, laptop runs cool, fast, super quiet. amazing.