The desktop: making the switch
Since Intel presumably designed the X25-M with mobile use in mind, putting this drive inside a desktop PC isn't entirely straightforward. Part of that has to do with the form factor: most desktops have 3.5" and 5.25" drive bays, while this SSD, like many others, has a 2.5" enclosure. With no moving parts inside the drive, you could just as well duct-tape the thing inside your case and forget about it. Mounting it properly with the help of Kingston's adapter rails is probably a cleaner solution, though.

Kingston provides the necessary screws, so all you need to set up the rails are a Philips screwdriver and a minimal amount of dexterity. The photo above should be helpful if you're at all confused about which way to screw on the rails, by the way. I know I was.

And here's the rail-fitted X25-M strapped on to a hard drive tray from an Antec P180 case. This tray requires one to screw the device in from the bottom, but Kingston's adapter has screw holes on the sides, too.

Unless you keep your desktop hard drive amazingly clean, the X25-M's capacity is also almost certain to pose problems. 80GB may not be a big step down from the MacBook's 160GB HDD, but it's an order of magnitude smaller than those sub-$100 1TB desktop drives we're seeing all over the market these days. At best, you'll want to do some spring cleaning to make sure everything fits. At worst, you'll have to spend a while reorganizing your data so that voluminous non-system files reside on an auxiliary drive. Kingston's kit doesn't include anything to help with that, either.

Once you've deleted all of your wedding videos and photos of your honeymoon in Morocco to make room, just put in the Acronis DVD and boot from it. You'll be greeted by an interface that looks almost, but not quite, like a Windows XP Explorer window. You can navigate the software using the mouse with the help of a golden-yellow cursor.

(Pay no mind to the small capacities in the image above—we booted off the CD within Microsoft's Virtual PC 2007 to take clean screenshots.)

Despite the corny interface, Acronis True Image HD struck us as a relatively well-designed piece of software. It offers automatic and manual cloning modes, not to mention a healthy dose of online help and helpful descriptions for each step. If you've never cloned a hard drive before, True Image HD should happily hold your hand throughout the process, resizing and transferring partitions as needed. And if you're familiar with the concept, you should also have no trouble navigating the interface to customize the process a little bit.

Once cloning was over, we set the X25-M as the primary boot device, and Windows started up as if nothing had happened. We did make one little configuration change right after the switch, though: heading to the Control Panel and disabling automated defragmentation. Defragging is great for mechanical hard drives, but not so much with SSDs. Flash media typically has both short access times and the ability to withstand only a limited number of writes. In theory, that means defragging will make your SSD die sooner without impacting performance in a particularly meaningful way—not quite the best use of system resources.

Is it worth it?
We decided to compare the X25-M to two different desktop HDD configurations: a single 320GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 and two of those drives running as a mirrored RAID 1 array. We measured boot times from when the power button was hit to when the Vista log-in screen appeared. To get numbers for the single drive, we simply unplugged one of the drives from the array. That had the side-effect of making the Intel RAID information screen stay up for roughly eight seconds longer than usual, so we subtracted that time from the final number. As for the directory copy test, we used the exact same 914MB directory as with our laptop.

Surprised? As great as the X25-M looks next to the mobile drive, the difference isn't so big here. Boot times were actually quickest with our inexpensive RAID 1 config, and the X25-M was neck-and-neck with the single Caviar SE16 in the directory copy test.

I should supplement these numbers with my personal, seat-of-the-pants impressions following two days of use. The X25-M did make the system feel noticeably speedier shortly after startup, during file searches, and when I needed to install applications. However, the initial feeling of speed petered out pretty rapidly. After a while, I forgot I was even using the X25-M—day-to-day file operations, application launches, game level loads, and using apps like Photoshop just didn't feel noticeably different. Switching back to the hard drives didn't make those tasks feel any slower, either.

The SSD did make its presence known in a more negative way: while experimenting with copy times, I once let several copies of a big folder pile up in the Recycle Bin. It didn't take long for Windows to complain that I'd run out of space. Mind you, that was after I had cleaned up my system drive and uninstalled several games so that everything would fit on the 80GB SSD with several gigabytes to spare.