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Intel 34nm SSDs Lower Prices, Raise Performance
Vigile writes "When Intel's consumer line of solid state drives were first introduced late in 2008, they impressed reviewers with their performance and reliability. Intel gained a lot of community respect by addressing some performance degradation issues found at PC Perspective by quickly releasing an updated firmware that solved those problems and then some. Now Intel has its second generation of X25-M drives available, designated by a "G2" in the model name. The SSDs are technically very similar though they use 34nm flash rather than the 50nm flash used in the originals and reduced latency times. What is really going to set these new drives apart though, both from the previous Intel offerings and their competition, are the much lower prices allowed by the increased memory density. PC Perspective has posted a full review and breakdown of the new product line that should be available next week."
Fortunately I got it for only about ~$300 so I only "lost" $100 with the new ones coming out. That having been said, I don't regret the purchase at all, it is insanely faster than any other laptop drive out there, while being completely silent and power-friendly. As for TRIM support, I've heard that Intel is not going to add it for the older drives, but I'm not sure if that is just speculation or if it's been officially confirmed by Intel (Intel not expressly say the old drives are getting TRIM support is not the same as expressly denying the support). Fortunately, the drives with the newer firmware don't seem to suffer from much performance degradation, so I'm not really obsessed with TRIM anyway.
Oh and yes, it does run Linux (Arch 64-bit to be precise) just fine.
I can't wait for next year with the ONFI 2.1 FLASH chips (the new drives are not using the new ONFI standard yet) as well as 6Gbit SATA support. At that point I'll put together a new desktop that only uses SSDs, and turn my existing desktop into a 4TB RAID 1+0 file server to handle all the big files... the perfect balance of SATA & spinning media.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Getting the prices lower is definitely a move in the right direction. I'm looking forward to moving to SSD in the near future, and not having to worry about hard drive crashes anymore.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
While hard drives will continue to live on for a good while yet where $/GB considerations are paramount (especially archival type applications), the performance advantages of flash drives will soon trump the decreasing cost advantage both for workstation (x25-m) and server (x25-e) environments. The case for flash in servers is even more compelling, where we measure drives in terms of IOPS and a single Intel flash drive performs 10 or 20 times better than the best hard drives on the market for a fraction of the power consumption. Understandably, many IT managers are cautious about adopting new technologies, especially when the failure characteristics are not completely known, but I suspect the advantages are so great that minds are going to start changing, quickly.
The last page of the review states that these should cost you roughly $3 per GB. Whether that's "laughably expensive" depends on what you want to do with the drive.
AnandTech has a nice writeup too. If the price curve drops like the first-gen X-25M we should all be happy pretty soon.
..and it is fantastic. This was the largest performance increase i've seen on computers in over a decade. I was going to go with a Velociraptor because I knew how important drive access latency was but then Intel patched the fragmentation issue that was worrying me.
I got mounting rails to fit the drive into my desktop case so i'm using it as my primary desktop drive for OS, some applications (Adobe Design Premium Suite runs great on it! Photoshop CS4 loads in 3-4 seconds!), and my main games. I then have a 1.5 TB secondary drive to store my data and music collection etc. I paid around $430 for my 80GB Intel X25-M so being able to get the 160GB for that same price is a fantastic improvement. I will definitely only be going SSD in my machines from now on. Everything loads faster, I get consistently fast boot times even after months of usage.
It is amazing to see Windows XP load up and then all of the system tray apps pop up in a few seconds. You can immediately start loading things like e-mail and Firefox as soon as the desktop appears and there is no discernible lag on first load like you will get with SATA drives since they are still trying to load system tray applications.
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Last year when the x25-m first came out the 80 gig version cost $595, or just a little less than $7.50/gig. Now the same 1st gen drive costs $314 with a -10 dollar discount and free shipping on newegg, or about $3.92/gig.
The new 2nd generation drive 80 gig drive sells for $225, or $2.81/gig. If it follows the same price trend as the 1st gen model around this time next year it should cost ~125 dollars, or about $1.53/gig.
Here are the quick results of the xbench of my 5400rpm 160gig drive in my two year old macbook pro:
Compare those to the results of the new drive here: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3607&p=4
Sequential read on the SSD is over 6x faster, and sequential write is 2x faster, but for the performance where it matters the difference is much more noticeable. Random read on the SSD is nearly 140x faster, and random write is over 40x faster.
Couple that performance difference with the lower power consumption, lower noise, and higher threshold for damage, and its a no brainer as to what is the single most price-efficient possible upgrade you can make to a laptop to boost overall performance, responsiveness, and battery life.
I wish I could justify buying one now, but I can't. However, 12 to 18 months from now I will probably be shopping around for a new laptop, and when I do I won't be settling for anything but a SSD. The benefits are just to great to ignore.
How can reviewers be impressed by reliability when they've only had the units for, at most, a year? When these things hit the five-year mark running perfectly well with no data loss in the home/work environment, then I'll be interested.
Ok, they may have been stress tested in factories by the manufacturers, but reviewers don't do that sort of work.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
This has been covered many times. It's a good number. I can't recall the article, but basically if you write 20GB per day, you'll get more than 5 years out of it thanks to wear leveling and extra space (SSDs actually have more capacity than they make available to you). Now, you might scoff at that but:
1) 20GB/day is a lot for the typical user.
2) People who routinely do more than 20GB/day probably need a lot more storage than SSDs currently provide (you are talking about filling the drive in 4 days) so you probably won't be using an SSD for those purposes anyway
3) People who buy into SSDs at this point in time are typically more on the cutting edge, and are likely no have moved on before the drive wears out.
4) When the drive finally does start having problems, my understanding is that it won't just fail and you'll have lost data. The failure should happen on write, and if it fails to write that will be detectable. If it writes successfully, then it should be readable. If it does fail, I believe that part will just be marked inaccessible and the data will be written somewhere else. The drive should (again, as far as I know) provide details of the failure to SMART and other disk utilities, so the problem can be detected before it progresses to a critical stage. This is much better than magnetic media, where the typical failure is that you go to read data and it is suddenly inaccessible.
Of course, this is all just what I've read about previous generations. I have no data about the 34nm, but I have no reason to suspect it's any worse.
PS. If you want to know how much you currently write to disk and you run a linux system, check out /proc/diskstats. The 10th column should be number of sectors written. Each sector is 512 bytes, so take value*512/1024/1024/1024 and you'll get the number of GB each device has written since bootup.
Let's make some wild predictions based on recent price trends. (Trends found here). Over the last few years, flash memory has been increasing in GB/$ at a rate of 185% per year. Meanwhile, hard drives have slowed to only 42% improvement per year.
Based on these trends, here is the estimated cost of 10 TB using either technology:
July 2009: Platter = $750, Flash = $28,125
July 2010: Platter = $528, Flash = $9,868
July 2014: Platter= $130, Flash = $150
July 2019: Platter= $23, Flash = $0.80
July 2024: Platter= $4, Flash = $0.004
In July 2024, a 10 PB flash drive would cost $42! Of course, we can't assume these trends will continue, but it seems a good bet that we won't be worrying about the size of our mp3 collections. The traditional hard drive may only have five years of competitive life remaining.
Cool, thanks for the tip!
cat /proc/diskstats | grep "[sh]d[a-z] " | awk '{print $10 "*512/1024/1024/1024"}' | bc -l
Yes, I'm aware of what is in that document (that's how I figured out what the columns were to begin with). That document skips over the first 3 columns of the output for it's numbering (major device number, minor device number, and device name). It considers column 4 to be field 1. Not sure why they wrote the document that way, but PsychiKiller's command above uses awk to print out the 10th column, and that does indeed give you the number of bytes written.