Review on 💾 High-Performance Intel 40GB X25-V MLC Solid-State Drive - Retail Box SSDSA2MP040G2R5 by Jonathan Suarez

This drive is fast. There will be comments on the specs making it slower than other drives, but my actual use shows it's pretty fast. The Windows Experience Score for the drive (Q6600 with 6GB RAM) dropped from 5.8 to 7.1, although those numbers aren't true. It's hard to explain, let alone measure or rate, how much faster and smoother the whole PC *feels*. If you blink, you miss certain things that you would use to notice the pop-up. Interestingly, this also increased the WE scores for processor and memory. At this price you can't find faster/bigger drives as they all cost a little more. This is a small and easy investment in an SSD. I was disappointed to learn that there is no cloning software, but you can download a trial version of Acronis True Image Home for free and get the job done. Keep in mind that if you have a drive larger than 40GB that will be replaced by this SSD, which you probably do, you'll need to shrink the drive to make sure it's under 40GB before you can clone. Windows Imaging on Windows 7 might work, but I've had no luck with it. In fact, I've spent many hours trying to get it working with Windows Imaging. Also, I believe that Windows 7 is the only Windows OS that natively supports TRIM (you can do TRIM manually with the Intel SSD Toolkit on Win XP and Vista, there is no support for OS X currently). This is an important feature of second generation drives like Intel implemented in Windows 7 to maintain drive speed over time. Keep in mind that 40GB might be a bit small to replace a laptop drive. . Windows 7 takes up to 20GB on a clean install, leaving you around 17-18GB for additional software. That's enough space for additional programs and even some media. Only those with a large movie library will have issues with the size. It's more ideal as a desktop replacement since you'll always have an extra hard drive to store all your media and you'll use an SSD as the boot/OS drive to get the speed benefits. But overall I liked it so much that I replaced all 6 PCs in my family's home with these drives (3 laptops, 3 desktops). Don't ask me why we have so many computers but they are all getting old (over 2 years) and these SSDs are giving them life back and let me use them for a year or two until then. Full update again. This is the best drive upgrade I've ever done in my 20 years of computing. Once you start you will not regret it. Update: I noticed a few things from my experience of updating 6 systems with these SSDs. SSDs benefit the most from Windows 7. SSDs don't have as much impact on systems older than 3 years (anything below C2D 1.46GHz). Systems with 4GB RAM and above won the most.