Intel pushes solid state

Are these also faster than a normal drive?
 
Yes much faster I believe? No moving parts...

Anyone know the price of these... Having a 80 gig for your OS and Programs and say 750gig for movies etc. would really be a nice set-up... ;)
 
Uli said:
Are these also faster than a normal drive?
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The are better for some things because data can be read ad hoc. With HDDs, its only really fast if you read it in the order in which it is on the disk.

With SSD (like Ram) the order doesn't matter.
 
SlyFly said:
Yes much faster I believe? No moving parts. Anyone know the price of these... Having a 80 gig for your OS and Programs and say 750gig for movies etc. would really be a nice set-up... ;)
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The Intel X18-M and X25-M Mainstream SATA SSDs are available in 80 gigabyte (GB) capacities, with 160GB versions sampling in the fourth quarter of this year. The 80GB drive achieves up to 250MB per second read speeds, up to 70MB per second write speeds and 85-microsecond read latency for fast performance. The 80GB version is priced at $595 for quantities up to 1,000. These SSDs are available now and end-customer products containing the Intel® High-Performance SATA SSDs are expected to begin shipping in the next few weeks.
 
Intel says the X-series SSDs deliver sustained read rates of 240MB/sec. -- about a third as fast as cached reads from a typical SATA laptop drive, but about five times faster than uncached reads. Read latency, meantime, is measured at just 85 microseconds (0.085 milliseconds) -- orders of magnitude faster than the 5.6 to 11.1 millisecond latencies of 5,400 rpm drives. Write speeds are listed at 70MB/sec., which approaches the 90MB/sec. to 100MB/sec. rates typical of fast SATA disks.
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Source: http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS4898216344.html
 
Darn. And I spent US$700 only a month ago on my shiny OCZ SATA II SSD 64GB for my Sony VAIO laptop :sick: The only consolation I have is that my drive is SLC and these are MLC (which is very little consolation indeed...)

This drive is getting very good reviews:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-x25-m-SSD,2012.html
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09/10/review_intel_x_25m_ssd/
http://www.laptopmag.com/review/storage/intel-x25-m.aspx
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080908-intel-tosses-hat-into-ssd-ring-with-80gb-launch.html

It's interesting that they manage to get such good speed out of MLC technology, where, historically, MLC drives have sucked compared to SLC drives (where write speed and multitasking is concerned). Kudos to Intel for that, and for pricing these quite decently (relatively speaking) too.


Anyone want to buy an OCZ SATA II SSD 64GB? :D
 
Read speed is 17x faster than Samsung SSD, but the write is just as bad as Samsung or even a little bit lower. From tomshardware. Want to see the extreme edition SSD, wonder if the write will be better.
 
alf101 said:
U had an option - think it was a 60GB one. Very pricey
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Oh, right... But I don't think those SSDs were this model which has only just been announced...?


chubster said:
Read speed is 17x faster than Samsung SSD, but the write is just as bad as Samsung or even a little bit lower. From tomshardware. Want to see the extreme edition SSD, wonder if the write will be better.
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17x??? Where does it say that (I admit, I skimmed through the article...)?

I wouldn't call the write speed 'bad'. Slow in comparison to the read speed, yes. Also, the Samsung is SLC (while the Intel is MLC) so its write speed should be faster. The 'Extreme Edition' of the Intel SSD will use SLC, so it will be a LOT more expensive, but it should write a lot faster also (SLC has higher write speeds than MLC) - Intel is claiming 170MB/sec write speed (vs. 70MB/sec for the MLC version)... It will only be available in 32GB and 64GB, though: http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/extreme/index.htm I reckon these drives will easily cost upwards of US$1000 :(
 
Tns said:
pitty it's going to cost a fortune
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Very true. I started spec-ing a desktop system build a little while back and came to the conclusion that I could put 4x250GB Seagate drives in RAID 0 for less than cost of one decent SSD (with a LOT less capacity). In fact, I could even add a Seagate 1TB hard drive to backup from the non-fault-tolerant RAID 0 array, and still it would not cost as much... Heck, I could put 10x250GB drives in RAID 0 (if that's even possible and worth it) for the price of one of these Intel SSDs :D

Am I still tempted by the far superior latency, random access speeds and general 'pep' (e.g. speed of virus scanning, searching files, etc.) that SSDs offer (now that I've tasted it via the OCZ in my laptop)? HECK YES :p
 
Only a matter of time...the prices will crash.

Just look at what happened to the usb sticks. They used to be 32mb not too long ago....now we are almost at 32gb. (Last I heard was 16gb)
 
I don't understand how it's so expensive though - if you look at a SD card - it's only a little piece of plastic and stuff....

Wouldnt mind having one of these, even if only 40GB.
 
Keeper said:
I don't understand how it's so expensive though - if you look at a SD card - it's only a little piece of plastic and stuff....

Wouldnt mind having one of these, even if only 40GB.
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The chips they use are far higher quality than the flash stick type...has to be for the speed.
 
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