I’ve been running an Intel X-25M G1 in my Mac for about 9 months. I paid $325 for it last year. It’s been the single biggest performance improvement I’ve ever made to a system. I thought the SSDs were supposed to be more reliable than mechanical hard drives, as there are no moving parts. However, I was wrong. This morning my Mac Mini which had the Intel X-25M in it came to a grinding halt. The whole system just felt sluggish and I could see in activity monitor that disk speeds were just a few MB/sec. I booted up from an OS X DVD and was going to try to run a repair on the SSD, but then it stopped showing up altogether.

After I reinstalled OS X on another drive I plugged the X-25M into a firewire docking station, and the drive is showing up in disk utility as being 0 bytes in size, and being read only. Umm, I think that means the drive is toast.

I called Intel support and they agreed I had done the right things to test the drive. They’re going to send me a new drive once I send back the old one. I’m really hoping they send me the Intel X-25M G2 which has TRIM support. We’ll see.

Also, this was a good test of my backup system. I backup daily to my OpenSolaris server running ZFS. After I loaded OS X up on my replacement it was a matter of running a quick rsync and I had all my data back. I do keep time machine backups too, but I’ve been disconnected from my time machine drive for a week or two.