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Intel's First SSD Blows Doors Off Competition
theraindog writes "Intel is entering the storage market with an ambitious X25-M solid-state drive capable of 250MB/s sustained reads and 70MB/s writes. The drive is so fast that it employs Native Command Queuing (originally designed to hide mechanical hard drive latency) to compensate for latency the SSD encounters in host systems. But how fast is the drive in the real world? The Tech Report has an in-depth review comparing the X25-M's performance and power consumption with that of the fastest desktop, mobile, and solid-state drives on the market."
A step in the right direction, but at $600 per 1000 I am gonna wait a bit longer before jumping on the SSD bandwagon.
This is great and all, but if I had to choose, give me more SSD storage. It's got plenty of speed right now, I'll be impressed when SSDs can be an actual alternative to disks.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
SSD doesn't have a seek delay or rotational delay.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
SSDs are *very* compelling. The lack of mechanical moving parts, better seek time, better read and write rates, better random access (goodbye defragmentation?), less noise, lees heat, better power consumption and the ability for us to finally use a lot of the bandwidth of those interfaces we've had for ages - what's not to like?
However, they're going to need to get a lot cheaper, and we're going to need to see capacities in the hundreds of gigabytes before they start to take off, but take off they will.
To be fair, in a web-serving or database read-only type operation it does in fact blow the doors off everything else. I have never seen IO graphs even close to that good on a single drive (SSD or not).
If anyone's seen the results, it's in first place in speed but not in a "door blowing manner". It's just slightly faster than the next guy.
Pardon me, but it is "blowing down the doors" (and the house too) in some tests, like this one. More than 3x the number of transactions of the second fastest flash drive? 7x faster than the slowest SSD drive? And the traditional HDDs are so crushed at the bottom I can't make out a ratio, but 30x or more? That is just ownage of the highest level. Yes, the write speeds aren't exactly compelling but for IO and read-heavy uses it's completely mindblowing.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Western Digital blah blah, 2.5" mobile blah blah. How do they compare to the mainline Hitachi and Seagate 15k Fibre Channel? EMC's SSD offerings? I want to know what I can expect for data warehousing on Oracle RAC.
What?
Anyone know about the general longevity of these devices?
The shelf life of a hard drive isn't incredibly impressive.
Well, NAND has the whole "already exists" thing going for it.
If you read the article, NCQ actually makes sense. The Intel drive actually finishes requests before the CPU gets around to asking "are you done yet?". That time between the drive finishing and the drive being told what to do next is spent idle. By supporting NCQ, the drive can convince the CPU to send large batches of commands and get rid of that latency.
It's faster for the same reason that FTP is faster than IRC DCC. FTP just keep sending bytes as long as the other end doesn't close the connection. IRC DCC sends a packet, waits for a reply, sends the next packet, and so on.
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4 SCSI-320 Cheetah 32GB, 15K RPM drives in RAID 0.
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What company would really want to run their DB on a Raid 0 (Striped) Disk setup? Does this not put it at risk from a single spindle failure?
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.