It's a SATA II drive, so the interface won't slow it down.

Today's fastest CPUs make short work of driver initialization, booting in as little as 20 something seconds, so it seems the logical next step would be a faster boot drive.

And if Windows was rewritten to take advantage of multiple cores and this drive's NCQ (that compensates for the pokey CPU)...

I would expect the latter could happen in Windows 7 even, just to give prospective customers something to get excited about besides "it's Vista compatible!"

Intel estimates that the 80GB X25-M will last for five years with "much greater than" 100GB of write-erase per day.

that's impressive! Only issue is the same with disc based drives: many times you write-erase the exact same areas over & over while other areas are rarely used. That could mean the part where the temp file is stored is killed in a few years.

But that's a worst case example. I doubt it would happen.

I don't think there is any doubt that solid state is the future of storage but keep in mind that the write performance of this Intel drive is just below 80MB/sec, significantly less than the fastest mechanical drives. In addition the large capacities required by most video editors are either unavailable at this point in time or priced out of reach. Don't get me wrong I don't want to be a naysayer as I think Intel has made a good leap here.

I think at this point in time a solid state boot drive and a large mechanical array is looking to be a good setup. Kind of a hybrid setup that will eventually migrated to an all solid state system as capacities go up and prices come down.

But I also suspect that traditional hard drive builders will fight tooth and nail to hold on to this market and their business as long as possible. That will mean faster, larger, and cheaper drives.

Nothing like a little competition to rev up the market!

- Mark

Intel is adding an Extreme drive in the spring with twice the write performance... (using SLC Flash instead of MLC and a few other tweaks).

80 meg's a sec is still higher then HDV's bitrate. Should still be more then fast enough to for capturing/editing. Normally it's the head moving that kills a disc drive's read/write performance. With solid state that shouldn't be an issue. Hopefully.

Head moving is measured as latency, and here it is two orders of magnitudes faster than the fastest spinning magnetic disks.

But video rendering etc. is more about sustained transfer rate, and here the SSDs are about the same speed as hard drives.

Very impressive for a boot drive.

Do you think these drives performance remains constant regardless of quantity of data stored? I.E. same performance with 5 GB or 75GB of stored data?

Probably would obsolesce defragmenting too.