Surface Temperature

We monitored the surface temperature of the Intel X25-M and five hard disk drives during their benchmarks. The following chart shows their operating temperature range, from idle to maximum load. Please note that instead of giving you the absolute numbers, we are showing the temperature delta, which is the difference between the actual temperature and the ambient room temperature.

The Intel X25-M was quite a cool drive. Even at peak load, the surface temperature only rose by a maximum of 4.8 °C above ambient temperature. With a room temperature of 30 °C, the drive was just slightly warm at a little below 35 °C.

Even the coolest hard disk drives we tested, the 1 TB Western Digital Caviar GP and the newer 2 TB Western Digital Caviar Green were not able to come close. The two hard disk drives have a spindle speed of between 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM, which allow them to greatly reduce their operating temperature.

In contrast, high-performance hard disk drives with a spindle speed of 10,000 RPM have much higher operating temperatures. The Western Digital VelociRaptor BLFS, which is the variant without the IcePack mounting frame / heatsink, is 4.6 °C hotter at idle and 8.4 °C hotter at peak load.

WinBench 99 Version 2.0

Transfer Rate Profile

Unlike hard disk drives, solid state drives do not have to deal with areal density. Hence, an almost completely flat transfer rate profile across the entire capacity. The Intel X25-M delivered a read throughput of around 270 MB/s, which is actually 8% higher than the official read speed of 250 MB/s.

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