Intel has moved to a more advanced, 34- nanometer manufacturing process for its leading NAND flash-based Solid State Drive (SSD) products and the results are spectacular. Read on to see how the Intel X25-M Mainstream 160GB Generation 2 SATA SSD does against more than a dozen other 2.5″ SATA drives!

Intel informed us that while many specifications have been improved, that they do not expect many noticeable gains on application-based benchmarks. Targeted drive benchmarks and tests will show the differences however. It should noted that the X25-M will also support Microsoft Windows 7 when it becomes available. At that time, Intel plans to deliver a firmware update to allow support of the Windows 7 Trim command, along with an end user tool, to allow users to optimize the performance of their SSD on Windows XP and Vista operating systems.