From the archive · 9 February 2009
2009: Intel sent us its first SSDs to put to the test
February 2009: X25-E samples (SLC cells) arrive straight from Intel. A full study — RAID, SQLIO, native versus Hyper-V — with a published report.
We tested the boot time of an IBM T60p laptop with a 7200 rpm HDD and the Windows XP operating system against the boot time with an Intel X25-M SSD built on 34nm technology and the Windows 7 operating system with “trim support”.
Although the time improves by 50%, we fell short of its full potential because of the limitations of the SATA controller integrated on the motherboard.
Video of the SSD vs HDD boot test (YouTube)
The full study — “A brief study of the Intel X25-E SSD in server environments with RAID systems and Hyper-V virtualised systems” — compared the X25-E against 10K and 15K rpm SAS disks across multiple RAID architectures, measuring IOPS, throughput and latency with SQLIO. It included something rarely seen in 2009: the native versus Hyper-V .vhd virtual disk comparison, at a time when hardly anyone was virtualising disk-intensive workloads. The conclusion was a decade ahead of its time: solid-state storage would change everything.
Today, in 2026
Today our platform is 100% NVMe — Intel Optane for microsecond latencies and Solidigm for production. Not a single spinning disk. The 2009 report laid the first stone of that conviction.
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