Back in February, Allyn was writing his first review for PC Perspective, a review of the new Intel X-25 M SSDs.  As he tested their various speeds, he began noticing some odd behaviour from the shiny new SSDs.  At the start of the testing the drives were incredibly fast, but over time the performance degraded significantly. Being the type of guy that he is, he ensured that the results were repeatable on more than one drive and that the degradation followed similar patterns.  That was published in a review that caused quite a stir.  Intel’s new super fast drives could develop some serious problems under certain usage conditions that would permanently reduce their speed enormously.

Allyn touches on that history in his look at Intel’s response to the issue, a new firmware upgrade.  This new firmware is meant not only to fix drives that have never seen this problem, but to bring back to life those HDDs that have succumbed to fragmentation.  Can this new firmware really ressurect those poor SSDs from February and let them reach 80MB/sec again?  Read on and find out.

“The 8820 firmware has completely renewed my faith in the X25-M. The weak link has been eradicated, and I’m thoroughly impressed with the renewed performance it will bring to all M series drive users. I am also thoroughly pleased with Intel for being so open to feedback from the reviewers.”

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