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

Oh Yeah?

[MyLongNickName]

My SBDs will blow THEIR doors off.

Re:Oh Yeah?

[Myrddin Wyllt]

That's not pedantry, it's rigour.

Thank you for taking the time to correct my misuse of a sixty year old acronym in an off-hand quip replying to a fart joke. It is this level of attention to detail which makes slashdot what it is.

Re:Your SSDs

[gardyloo]

Those're STDs.

Well, a step in the right direction

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Well, a step in the right direction

[orkysoft]

Why? They're almost free at 60 cents each :-P

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.

More Details and Benchmarks Here

[Anonymous Coward]

This article at HotHardware, has a few additional tests that show real-world usage models as well as synthetic benchmarks: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80GB-SATA-Solid-State-Drive-Intel-Ups-The-Ante/

The PCMark Vantage tests are especially impressive: http://www.hothardware.com/Articles/Intel-X25M-80GB-SATA-Solid-State-Drive-Intel-Ups-The-Ante/?page=7

Damn it intel

[sakdoctor]

You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!

Re:Blows doors off? I call bullshit.

[Kjella]

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.

Re:One test they never run - FRAGMENTATION

[chill]

Yes, it would wear the disk out faster, but your original premise is flawed.

Clustering locations would allow for accessing large chunks of data with one fetch, instead of lots of little fetches. If you're old enough, think back to the Blitter on the Amiga and moving contiguous chunks of memory as opposed fragmented blocks.

Remember, RAM can get fragmented just as badly as a hard drive.

Re:where is the

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably right next to the dlsyexia tag.

Re:Your SSDs

[Anonymous Coward]

Those're STDs.

It burns when I read/write

Re:where is the

[sexconker]

The preferred spelling is lysdexia.