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The Intel X25-V 40GB drive is well known to be one of, if not the best low-cost SSD on the market at the moment. The SSD is basically an Intel X25 G2 drive with TRIM support except with half the NAND flash memory and using only half of the SSD controller channels. The major impact is well known at this point, the Intel X25-V 40GB drives have poor sequential write performance that is approximately half that of the Intel X25-M 80GB. Of course, with two X25-V’s in RAID 0, write speed is essentially doubled and read speed goes well beyond a single drive.

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As a follow-on to the Supermicro X8SIL-F review, I had some interest in seeing power consumption figures for the CPU’s involved. I have already discussed the Intel Core i3-530′s low idle power consumption and relatively low maximum power consumption extensively. As I have a habit of doing, I decided to use an Intel Xeon X3340 in the new server for two reasons. First, I wanted to see a performance of the X3440 versus the other CPU’s I have tested for video encoding and transcoding on a Windows Home Server platform. Second, I wanted to have a server running Microsoft Hyper-V Server with Windows Home Server and Ubuntu 10.04 as guest operating systems running in Hyper-V virtual machines. In the end, I found that the Xeon X3440 provides a great feature set, relatively low power consumption, and performance all at a reasonable cost.

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