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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.'"

3 of 130 comments (clear)

  1. WTF? by xantho · · Score: 3, Insightful

    2,000,000 hours = 228 years and 4 months or so. Who the hell cares if you make it to 5,000,000?

    1. Re:WTF? by Kenja · · Score: 4, Insightful
      "2,000,000 hours = 228 years and 4 months or so. Who the hell cares if you make it to 5,000,000?"

      Mean time between failures is not a hard perdiction of when things will break. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTBF

      --

      "Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
  2. Re:MTBF by Target+Drone · · Score: 3, Insightful

    5 000 000 hours = 570.397764 years I don't know how Intel came up with those numbers

    From the wikipedia article

    Many manufacturers seem to exaggerate the numbers to sell more products (i.e.) Hard Drives to accomplish one of two goals: sell more product or sell for a higher price. A common way that this is done is to define the MTBF as counting only those failures that occur before the expected "wear-out" time of the device. Continuing with the example of hard drives, these devices have a definite wear-out mechanism as their spindle bearings wear down, perhaps limiting the life of the drive to five or ten years (say fifty to a hundred thousand hours). But the stated MTBF is often many hundreds of thousands of hours and only considers those other failures that occur before the expected wear-out of the spindle bearings.