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."

Comments

Blows doors off? I call bullshit.

[azav]

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. "Blows doors off" reads like marketing spooge trying to overhype something that has a small or no advantage over the next contender. Misleading title.

One test they never run - FRAGMENTATION

[Anonymous Coward]

Since SSD don't really have "sectors", do they fragment files the same way as HDD?

Also, what would the defrag speeds be?

Re:One test they never run - FRAGMENTATION

[Thaelon]

I don't mean to attack directly, but you seem to be just well informed enough to be dangerous. First, you seem to think a quick reboot is something that should be no big deal and happen rather often. This is kind of appalling. If you need to reboot a computer often (more than to install new hardware), something serious is wrong with it or it's OS.

Secondly, this phrase, "Hard drives need explicit defragmenting" is misleading as all hell. Hard drives do not need defragmenting. They're made of platters, heads, etc. It's a filesystem that need fragmented. If you want to really nit-pick, it's files within file systems. Still, not hard drives.

Some filesystems are much more prone to fragmentation than others. Namely FAT, FAT32, and NTFS. They have no fragmentation prevention measures. Luckily there are good tools available to defragment them. Other filesystems like ext3 have built in fragmentation-prevention techniques that go a long way, so it's not nearly so big of an issue. They do have defragmentation programs but they don't seem to be trusted by some experts.

As for RAM fragmentation, it's such a non-issue that it's worth explaining. Note that it's Random Access Memory! It's designed to be read randomly. So reading two contiguous blocks is no faster than reading two blocks on opposite ends of the stick or address space. Hence fragmentation is a complete non-issue. And it's a near certainty that your RAM defragger will waste more time than just leaving the RAM alone. Assuming it's not just scamware anyway.

So why does that make your post dangerous? Perpetuating the myth that rebooting is cool and normal is harmful in the long run. It's harder on hardware and hell on uptimes. As is perpetuating the misunderstanding that hard drives need defragmented. Some undereducated, child-of-nepotism CTO might read your post, then take it to heart to the detriment of some entire company and all of their clients. Rebooting machines willy-nilly and attempting to defragment hard drives. In any case, misinformation on a public forum is dangerous, okay?

SSD on PS3?

[nobodyman]

With more PS3 games offering an "install-to-HD" option, I wonder how SSD would affect performance. My theory is that playing a console game is a read-heavy experience, so an SSD should do quite well, right? Any rich gamers out there that have tried this out yet?

Re:Well, a step in the right direction

[Just Some Guy]

A step in the right direction, but at $600 per 1000 I am gonna wait a bit longer before jumping on the SSD bandwagon.

I'd place an order for one this instant if I could. My company uses a relatively small database, on the order of 40GB of online data. It's running on 4 SCSI-320 Cheetah 32GB, 15K RPM drives in RAID 0. By all accounts, this single SSD would out-seek the Cheetahs, meaning that our website can serve more customers and more quickly. This is a total no-brainer for a lot of applications, even at the current price.

Commercial uses don't fragment

[petes_PoV]

You store the database on these, so fragmentation questions are moot. Provided you've set the (database) block size correctly, the only time you'd have to modify (as opposed to write new) a block is to update a VARCHAR field that won't fit in the original size.

What would be interesting would be to put an Oracle database block interface on these puppies, instead of the normal filesystem interface. then you'd just have the database say to the storage "get me block X" and it appears. No filesystem overheads - which given the speed of these things could turn out to be significant.

Looks like we'll be back on RAW "disks" for databases. Plus ca change!

Price is over-rated

[sampson7]

I get a little tired of hearing about how the price has to drop orders of magnitude before SSD is viable. Shop around a little people!

I ended up buying a refurb Dell laptop for around $1000 with a 64 gig SSD. Was it the latest and greatest? Nope. But it was about $150/200 more than a similarly priced computer with a traditional drive (which of course, was larger). Since the only significant problems I've ever had with my two prior Dell laptops (admittedly a small sample) involved the hard drive, going with the SSD (especially when you include the "cool" factors -- both temperature and nerd-ism) was an easy decision.

But the point is that as SSDs become more prevalent, they become available at cheaper prices. I'm sure that as the Intel drives are rolled out, the "obsolete" drives currently on the market will continue to fall in price and become available to bottom-dwelling cheap-o-s like me who may not be able to justify $1000, but can rationalize $200 without a whole lot of difficulty.

Re:It's not the speed, it's the storage

[Firethorn]

At current improvement rates, I think that you're looking at 7-10 years before SSD becomes cheaper than 3.5" form factor drives for sheer storage. We seem to have been lagging at around a terabyte for a while. Meanwhile it seems that SSD is doubling in capacity per $ at it's 'sweet spot' each year at the moment.

Going by performance improvements, it'll only be a 2-4 years before companies start replacing their platters with solid state for intensive database operations, especially those biased towards reads. Those 10k-15k RPM drives are significantly more expensive and store less than 7200/5400 RPM drives.

The article mentions $595. Looking up, a 300GB 15k HD is $400 for an OEM. That's 5 times the size of the 80GB SSD mentioned in the article. Figure on a doubling each year, that'd be 3 years before the SSD exceeds current models. Figure in the lower power requirements and such, and I can see SSDs selling well before reaching parity based purely on size - their improved seek time, lower power demands, etc...

Re:Well, a step in the right direction

[AllynM]

The review is slashdotted at the moment so I can't RTFM, but...

If a velociraptor beat an SSD in boot time, well, something is wrong with their test, or perhaps the bios was waiting on the SSD to initialize (entirely possible based on the added intelligence on their controller chipset). I just went from an SLC SSD to a velociraptor and the difference is painful. Boot time is slower. The system is just 'laggier'.

You can't judge the differences between SSD and HDD from charts and graphs on review sites. Reserve judgement until you have actually sat down at an SSD driven system. It is on par with the difficulty we all used to have explaining the difference in 'feel' between a single and dual cpu system back before they were mainstream.

Seek time dropping to 0.1 msec changes the entire equation. Events that would usually thrash your hard drive for several seconds happen *instantly* on an SSD. When you boot into the windows desktop, everything acts as if it was already cached, and does so even if other drive intensive tasks are already running.

Remember the reason everyone puts their swapfile on a second hard drive? SSD's nullify that reasoning.

A velociraptor beating it on write speed is irrelevant - a typical windows system will be reading from the drive occasionally during the writes. An HDD will drop to significantly below its max 'straight line' speed when you throw in a bit of random access (or fragmentation). End result: the SSD will still roast it in practical use.

I only switched to the raptor as a stopgap so I can sell off my current SSD in preparation to get this Intel unit. After seeing the change in speed / responsiveness in practical usage, the new SSD can't get here fast enough...

Re:Well, a step in the right direction

[Just Some Guy]

I hope you know how volatile RAID 0 can be.

Oh yeah, but we can do a bare-metal recovery in an acceptable amount of time, so a failure is more along the lines of "dangit, break out the tapes".

To answer other posters while I'm at it:

That chassis is maxed out on RAM. We could buy a newer, bigger system but this SSD would serve about the same ends for a lot less money and effort. Besides, at some point you have to flush those cached writes out to disk. Right now, that is sometimes a bottleneck on our system. If we could magically make those writes several times faster, it'd be a nice win.

Hey, I admit that our usage patterns probably don't match a lot of others'. These may not be ideal for everyone, but from what I've seen they'd work great for us.

Re:Well, a step in the right direction

[Korin43]

If you want a fast disk, get some i-RAM (you'll probably want it doing constant backups to a normal hard drive). It's expensive, and you max out at 4 Gb (unless you put it in some sort of RAID), but it's hellafast. With the price of 1 GB sticks of RAM, you could probably do 4 in RAID 0 for around $500 (is 16 Gb enough space?).

Re:Well, a step in the right direction

[Nefarious Wheel]

I hope you know how volatile RAID 0 can be. A problem with any single one of those drives will screw up the whole works until you can restore from a backup

Oh my, pardon me, I am rolling on the floor laughing, biting the carpet and frightening the cat (ROFLBTCAFTC).

I remember reading these exact same arguments in articles written during the early days of computing, when people were complaining of the multi-platter nature of modern disk packs. These started hitting the market around 1963 I think. The argument went -- if you stack all those platters together, the failure of one platter would trash the entire set! Oh noes...

Re:Well, a step in the right direction

[benow]

IRAMs don't play well with controllers... bad SATA implementation. Good idea, bad implementation, and a costly experiment on my part.

Not for long.

[Anonymous Coward]

While it may blow the doors off the competition, Slavegate's lawyers will blow the doors off of Wintendo.