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Leaked Intel Roadmap Shows 600GB SSD
An anonymous reader writes "Solid State Drives have been trying to fill the mechanical hard drive niche for some time now. The problem is that while flash memory is faster than a spinning platter, it is also much more expensive per gigabyte. Over the weekend details leaked about Intel's SSD roadmap, and what's most interesting about it is that the capacities of Intel's SSDs are going to increase in a big way. First off is a refresh to the high performance X25-M range of SSDs. Currently available in 80GB and 160GB models, these will be replaced by a new design, codenamed Postville, which will come in 160GB, 300GB and 600GB variants."
price still needs to come down!
Now I'll be able to afford the 60GB model! (Because you know, I deal with junk!)
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
Not trying to be ironic here, but do we have any idea on how those will behave in the longer run? Are there improvements from the previous generations? TFA doesn't have much information besides capacity.
The price is still far too high. I recognize that an SSD can provide a good performance boost, but still...the prices are way too high. I'll likely give it another year or two before I pull the trigger on one.
Not that any of you care -_-;;
Living With a Nerd
For example, this is a posting using the code name: http://communities.intel.com/message/51359;jsessionid=F3036FCC8C1DD878FCED25A7A6D32547.node6COM
Aren't SSD's supposed to be way more stable in laptops that get bumped?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Let me fix that for you:
If price comes down first, Postville might have a chance.
As punishment you are to abstain from posting on /. for a week.
Intel does not have the fastest MLC drives out there (X25-E is SLC), and now they're ditching SLC?
I wonder how their performance will match the other controllers (Sandforce, Indilix, Samsung, etc)... perhaps their new MLC is more along the lines of what Sandforce is doing?
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for Moore's Law!
Call me when I can replace my 320GB "spinning rust" drives for about the same amount of money.
I remember writing to PC Magazine in 1986 about the need for adequate procedures when the first 5MB (Not GB but MB :-) hard drives were reaching the market.
Now I have 3+ terabytes on my desktop machines. Backups are just as painful as ever.
Now instead of slow diskettes for backups, I use redundant drives and DVD-Rs for off-line backups and purchased software solutions. (And I know about using "Time Machine" to back up the Macs every night, but that's local, not off-line.)
Same slow shit, different day.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Since they know new ones are on the way. So demand will fall, and so will prices.
Judging by this I'll be able to fit my pr0n library on a single SSD sometime around 2038!
Of course, by then I'll be too blind to appreciate it, but you have to love the onward march of technology
650 GB is enough porn for anyone
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
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Suppose SSDs were to improve so that external disks offered NO advantages in price, performance or capacity. How would this effect what sorts of databases there might be? I wonder if there are certain types of uses/queries/softwared that just don't happen/doesn't exist because it would involve alot of slow random access on large data. If this were to become very cheap for great performance, what new goodies / opportunities might this bring?
...
That's right, because dick [sic] size is the only metric there is! Let's ignore seek time, streaming read/write performance, MTBF, power efficiency, shock resistance or any other number of characteristics that might be weighted in different levels of importance between laptop users, desktop users and server architects.
Spinning hard drives are very slightly more stable against bumps, due to the gyroscopic effect.
Finally gave in and put an 80GB X-25M in my desktop as an OS drive. It's amazing how much of a difference it makes overall, everything just feels much more responsive now, some games actually saw a huge difference. WoW loading times went from annoying to practically nonexistent, if I had to make the decision again I would buy the 160GB model instead.
While I can somewhat agree with your sentiment (64GBytes isn't a lot when you are saving media data) I feel you have exaggerated a bit in the OS numbers:
On all but the most unusual of setups (I know people who do FPGA development whose tools take up 20GBytes by themselves) it's going to be "user data" that is taking up the vast majority of the disk space - not the operating system and applications (given that most operating systems still ship on no more than a single 4GByte DVD you would need compression of about 8:1 to fill up the disk from that alone). I have no doubt that if you take photos or have a big movie collection 500GBytes is not going to see like all that much though.
Very much so. But hard drives with the shock protection are still pretty robust. I love having the SSD in my machine... it's amazing how fast everything goes. Programs start instantly, it boots so fast that I disabled hibernation, but I'm still at a paucity of space with a 256GB SSD.
The thing you're paying for with SSDs is performance. If you haven't used one, you don't know what you're missing, but if you have, you never wanna go back to things the way they were.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
didn't ssds used to be a bit cheaper a few years ago, then the prices went way the fuck up?
I'm sure a significant percentage of slashdotters either have second hard disks in their machines or some type of NAS system. The issue is that while we can easily say "40GB should be a good enough C: drive for anybody", that's only because we have a few terabytes within an ethernet cable's reach to store other stuff on. Consider the average Joe/Jane who has a 12-megapixel camera and a sizeable iTunes library. Even if we assume that they don't have a single XviD or MKV file on their drive, that just music and photos would start to make that C drive VERY cramped given the absence of another device to put it on. I've got friends whose Windows/Program Files directories can fit inside 15GB, and even their "My Documents" folder can keep that number inside 20, but their music/photo/video folders are easily north of 100GB. I agree with another poster that says that if you're going to pay a premium for the speed an SSD affords, you're not above paying an extra $75 for a WD Passport drive to carry your media on. The issue is convincing Joe and Jane Public of this, rather than having them say "ZoMg ThIs DrIvE iS tInY i CaNt FiT nEtHiNg On It!!!!1111"
I used a OCZ SSD for my boot disk in windows 7. It had all system files. I relocated all user files to my second disk which was a 1TB tradition hd. Little known fact, you can create symbolic links in Windows. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa365680%28VS.85%29.aspx Using these, you can also map individual directorys under Program Files (like game data). This hybrid approach is still incredibly faster than traditional hard disks.
Knowing Intel, most likely the new drives, which double the capacity, will remain the same price. Therefore your 160gb drive for $399 will be 320GB for $399, and imho approaching $1 per GB on SSD is a big freaking deal. Of course this info is an early leak and Intel has no mention of price. But with a new fab and smaller nm, most likely Intel will deliver on this theory.
If space is what you crave, get an SSD + a big old platter drive. Put your OS on the SSD and all those big honking media files on the HDD. That's what I've done for my desktop. Laptop users will not have the luxury of two internal drives in many cases.
SSC
It pays to be obsessive when you work in the storage industry. Being and idiot pays less, I hear.
Not as robust as you might think.
Shock protection (unless there's some development I'm not aware of) measures acceleration and parks the drive's heads if the acceleration is too much, in case that acceleration means the laptop is about to hit the floor. It's a good idea, but the application is limited. It's excellent when you drop the laptop, but it won't do you any good if you give the laptop a good jolt without any warning.
I killed my laptop's drive once by turning around in an office chair, and hitting the laptop with the chair's back. Drive immediately started making weird noises, and I spent all night copying stuff off it. The acceleration sensors are completely useless for something like that, since there's no way for it to guess an impact might be coming.
I store my photos on flickr
music on the CDs they came on
movies on the DVDs they came on
assorted junk like tech PDFs and a few downloaded ebooks, burn to cheap cds (relatively cheap, taiyo yudens)
I use an old reliable 8 gig drive that just keeps spinning, and have at least two gigs free right now. Running full bloat ubuntu, three different desktop environments on there, multiple everything, browsers, media players, office crap, etc. Still room to spare
Hugemongous giant home hard drives serve to fill pirate's needs (that's number #1) (no one drops a hundred grand on music and movies, so let's get real there on "legit" terrabyte's worth of tunez), and then semi pro or fanatical photogos (OK- that can really eat up space, but that ain't most everyone either), then extreme gamers would need a lot more.
I am none of those, so I can get by just fine with a small drive, looking forward to a really cheap SSD now, one of those 32 or 64 giggers. Should last me a decade or more. I think it's cool they make huge ones, both spinning and solid state, but I am questioning the need for "everyone" to need several hundred gigs of space at a minimum. *Some* people need huge amounts of space, but it is far from everyone today.
That's right, because dick [sic] size is the only metric there is! Let's ignore seek time, streaming read/write performance, MTBF [wikipedia.org], power efficiency, shock resistance or any other number of characteristics that might be weighted in different levels of importance between laptop users, desktop users and server architects.
Real people, and not just people of the "my computer is faster than your's, so NYAH!" mentality, also look at cost versus value. It is nice that I can shave off a couple ms of seek/read/write time, and it is nice that it eats less power, but these benefits cost several times more. If the benefits don't outweigh the cost difference, then there is no point.
A quick scan of Newegg shows that a SDD costs ~$2.21/GB, where a comparable traditional HDD costs only ~0.33, thats quite a difference, I'm not sure if 15 minutes of battery life, and perhaps (very generously) a second a day in seek/read/write time is worth that much. Granted this is a quick comparison between a 2.5" 120GB SSD, and a 2.5" 120GB HDD. Both being at, or towards, the bottom of their price point. Granted this gap decreases with lower capacities (but remains very considerable), I picked 120 since that is more usable than a 50GB drive with todays amount of bloat.
Not saying that SSDs are pointless, just that their real world applications are rather limited right now, and most of them find use only with the same crowd that would cough up $600 for a graphics card that does 10% more than a $150 one. Some people find incremental improvement worth exponential price increases, these people are a minority. Yes, SSDs are also useful for netbooks, laptops with very limited use, and other people need fast access to limited amounts of data. They are not set to replace HDDs in desktops quite yet.
I recently bought a 1TB drive for a bit under $100, and a SSD thats around a sixth as big costs three times as much. Not nearly competitive yet. Of this drive, around 111Gb are used already, not counting another ~100GB on my data drive. To cover all of this with an SSD would cost significantly more than my full computer (which isn't a slouch hardware wise). I'm sure I could find better things to do with the money. Life build another computer completely.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Its not that they are more expensive or quibbling over their traditionally abysmal random write performance.
Its the age old issue of oxide slowly being eaten away by electron tunneling causing the transister arrays to die.
That and some condition lots of people are reporting where their SSD's get slower over time I don't understand. I think it has something to do with the way the wear leveling works but it seems at a glance to me to be more a function of lack of maturity.
What is keeping me away from SSD is the fine print.. Intels "Guaranteed to work for 5 years at 20GB of write per day" ... Assuming a normal hard disk can sequentially write at a rate of 100MB per second (Many of us have disks which can do much better) this works out to 3 minutes worth of writes per day for 5 years. For my needs this renders the technology totally useless.
I told you it sucked to be old. :-)
It was a letter to the editor and it referred to the "new" 5"1/4 hard drives that were just becoming available for PC's and Macs.
I wasn't referring to the "Winchester" cartridge systems which had been around since the mid-70s or the RAMACs DASDs on mainframes which were available from IBM or Hitachi. [I still remember my string of 3330s fondly. The disk controller was more complex that the 360 it was attached to. [Or the removable muti-platter systems on the PDP-11 class of mini-computer. ;-}])
I was trying to warn of the Hell that was about to befall the small Mom&Pop shops who were just starting to get into computerizing their records.
No a minute of thought was ever paid to all those poor suckers who were being sold a bill of goods without understanding what MTBF meant and what to do WHEN the drive system croaked.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I already posted...
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
More powerful than a laser printer?
Shock protection (unless there's some development I'm not aware of) measures acceleration and parks the drive's heads if the acceleration is too much
IIRC it actually parks the hards if the apparent acceleration (which given relativity is all you can measure) is too little.
Because if the apparent acceleration is significantly less than gravity it means you are falling.......
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
though if you are buying a new laptop you do have the option of getting one where you can replace the optical drive with a hard drive.
Since USB sticks have grown to the size of multiple DVDs I find myself using optical drives a lot less. Sure I need them for installing boxed software but I do that sufficiantly rarely that an external is fine.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The media servers and extenders out there would also benefit as well. Heck, even game consoles would benefit.
Yeah, I just bought a branded 16GB usb key for £17 (including delivery). I can even boot Ubuntu off it. Who needs a hard disk other than for storing large numbers of files, or huge files?