October 11, 2008 6:00 AM PDT
Intel X-25M solid-state drive (80GB)
Editors' rating: 4
The good: Fast transfer speeds; improves laptop battery life; shorter boot times.
The bad: Expensive; low gigabyte-to-dollar ratio.
The bottom line: Intel's X-25M solid-state hard drive enjoys several advantages over both spinning disk drives as well as other SSDs, including improvements to data throughput, boot time, and laptop battery life. Its one drawback is that it's pricier than even its other solid-state competition, but if you can forget about its cost, this is by far the fastest data drive available.
Read CNET's full review
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