Intel X25-E Extreme SSD Benchmarks On Linux

For testing we had installed the Intel X25-E Extreme SSD within a System76 Serval Professional. The hardware in this notebook consisted of an Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 (dual-core, clocked at 2.40GHz), 4GB of system memory, a NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GTS 512MB graphics processor, and a 1680 x 1050 display. On the software side it was running Ubuntu 8.10 (x86_64) with the Linux 2.6.27 kernel, GNOME 2.24.1, X Server 1.5.2, NVIDIA 177.82 display driver, GCC 4.3.2, and was using the EXT3 file-system. We had compared the performance of the Intel X25-E to that of a 200GB Seagate SATA HDD (ST9200420AS), which is another option when ordering from System76. The Seagate Momentus 7200.2 SATA HDD has a 16MB cache, SATA 2.0 interface, and operates at 7200 RPMs. The average latency for this drive is 4.17 msec, random seek time is 11.0 msec, and the random write seek time is 13.0 msec.

To see how well the Intel X25-E Solid-State Drive works with Ubuntu Linux, we had run a series of tests using the Phoronix Test Suite. These tests included timed ImageMagick compilation, Parallel BZIP2 compression, LZMA compression, LAME MP3 encoding, FFmpeg video encoding, GnuPG file encryption, Bork File Encrypter, IOzone, and Flexible IO Tester.