The Connectors

This is a Serial ATA drive, with native support for SATA 3.0 Gb/s. It is backward-compatible so you will have no problem using it with older SATA 1.5 Gb/s controllers. However, the faster SATA 3.0 Gb/s interface is necessary for optimal performance since Intel X25-M SSD boasts a sustained internal (NAND-to-buffer) read transfer rate of 250 MB/s.

Like all Serial ATA drives, it comes the standard SATA data (left) and power (right) connectors and is hot-pluggable. That means you can connect and disconnect this solid state drive to your PC while it's still running. There is no jumper block because there's really nothing for you to set.

Breather Hole

Unlike hard disk drives, the Intel X25-M SSD has no breather holes. That's because it is not a mechanical drive with spinning platters that require a filtered hole to equalize its internal pressure and allow condensation to escape. A solid state drive is basically made up of nothing more than a circuit board with a controller and NAND flash memory chips. Same stuff you will find in a USB flash drive.

Defragging The Intel X25-M

Unlike hard disk drives, flash-based SSDs write and overwrite data in large blocks of 512 KB to 1 MB in size. Even if you only need to overwrite one byte of data, it has to erase and overwrite an entire block. This causes a lot of wear on the memory cells and greatly reduces their lifespan. To prevent that from happening, SSDs perform wear leveling by spreading the writes so that the flash memory cells have equal wear.

Newer SSDs, like the Intel X25-M, also use a large write buffer to temporarily store and combine writes before they are actually written to the flash memory. This reduces the number of block erases and wear on the memory cells. Intel does not reveal how large the X25-M's write buffer is but it most certainly has a write buffer.

Both wear leveling and write combining will eventually cause performance to degrade because of internal fragmentation. Unfortunately, this kind of fragmentation cannot be corrected by traditional disk defragmentation software. To solve this performance issue, you have to use a special SSD defragmentation software. Sadly, Intel does not provide such a software yet. Perhaps in the near future...

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