For as long as the Intel X25-M solid state drives have been on the market, we have always had to end all of our other SSD reviews with "pretty good but" conclusions. The advent of a new generation of solid state drives like the OCZ Summit, with new controller logic and the addition of on-board cache memory, is finally giving Intel's mainstream drives some real competition. The performance of the OCZ Summit 250GB SSD is still not besting that of X25-M but it is coming close.
Where the OCZ Summit really shines in our tests is with write speeds - the addition of 64MB of cache definitely has increased overall write throughput compared to previous Samsung MLC-based designs and are indeed faster than the write speeds on the Intel X25-M. Intel's controller is doing much of the same kind of data shuffling and reorganization that the Summit is doing though without the advantage of on-board memory dedicated to the process.
The read speeds on the Summit are very good, though that is the one area that Intel still has a slight edge overall.
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