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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."
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?
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
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.