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Intel Stomps Into Flash Memory

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hoping-for-solid-returns dept.

jcatcw writes "Intel's first NAND flash memory product, the Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, is a challenge to other hardware vendors. Intel claims read rates of 28 MB/sec, write speeds of 20 MB/sec., and capacity of 1GB to 8GB, which is much smaller than products from SanDisk. 'But Intel also touts extreme reliability numbers, saying the Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours.'"

2 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Info. by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 3, Informative
    These claims will be made at the flash level (ie. ignoring what the block managers and file systems do).

    Different file systems and block managers do different things to code with wear levelling etc. For some file systems (eg. FAT) wear levelling is very important. For some other file systems - particularly those designed to work with NAND flash - wear levelling is not important.

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
  2. MEAN time between failures, what does that MEAN by tepples · · Score: 3, Informative

    Did they really test these for 5 million hours or are they just pulling the number out of their ass? It's a mean time between failures. An MTBF figure of 5 million hours means they tested 500,000 of them for 300 hours, and 30 of them failed. A rate of 150 million unit hours per 30 failures equals 5 million unit hours per failure.