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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!
For example, this is a posting using the code name: http://communities.intel.com/message/51359;jsessionid=F3036FCC8C1DD878FCED25A7A6D32547.node6COM
Agreed, SSDs still have many cost and reliability issues to overcome, and I'm not going to get too excited till I see some improvements in those areas. Solid State is the wave of the future, but the wave is still way out there and is only just reaching the rocks off-shore.
Help me fix my brother's injured butt!
Agreed...if they keep the price points the same, but double capacity, I would be much more inclined to pick one up. I know you don't technically *need* alot of space for a system drive, but I don't like having such limited free space. 160GB would be the absolute bare minimum I would use for a system drive these days, and even that's kinda pushing it.
Living With a Nerd
Yeah...I am sure that you have looked at the reliability numbers...like ever...
Intel x-25m reliability: http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/mainstream-sata-ssd-datasheet.pdf
BER (read error rate) of 1 sector per 10^15 bits read
MTBF 1,200,000 hours
Minimum 5 years useful life
WD Raptor Reliability: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=495
MTBF 1,400,000 hours
Other figures not given
and the WD Raptor is considered an Enterprise hard drive, so that should say something about the reliability expected. I don't see these drives failing any time soon, and I have a Intel x-25m 32GB I bought a little over a year ago running quite strong with no errors in my desktop that rarely is shutdown.
The only reliability problems I have seen is in MLC based drives we use here at work for database servers, they go offline and have to be reseated in order to bring them back, but we haven't had any of these fail yet even under the heavy strain of a database server.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
That criticism makes sense for a netbook drive where when it dies you just replace it and no need to backup--the email are already on IMAP and everything else was just caches. But for places where you really care about your data then there are all sorts of other questions: how does it crash? Does it crash in such a way that the RAID you are using keeps its integrity?
In general, conservatives (in the sense of not wanting to change) are right to be conservative because of the long arm of the law of unintended consequences. People who try new things can end up with better results if things go as planed. But there are many more ways for things to go not as planed and for the project to crash and burn--leaving you at square one with nothing to show but lots of money/time spent on a cinder.
Unfortunately, Intel seems to do like the rest, drop SLC in favour of MLC. That has a huge negative impact on both reliability and performance, but brings the price down and the capacity up.
That said, Intel's MLC drives are pretty good for MLC drives -- the X-25M is best in class, but still far below the speed and reliability of the X-25E.
If Intel could come out with a 128 GB X-25E, I would buy it immediately over a 600 GB X-25M at the same price. But they won't, because people don't want what's best, they want what's cheapest that still carries the "right" name.
Agreed, SSDs still have many cost and reliability issues to overcome, and I'm not going to get too excited till I see some improvements in those areas. Solid State is the wave of the future, but the wave is still way out there and is only just reaching the rocks off-shore.
That greatly depends on your specific application. I can tell you that installing an SSD in my work laptop was the single greatest (relative) performance jump I've ever seen, starting with my 8086/1MB/CGA machine until the present day, including all processor/memory/graphics upgrades I've ever done.
I can also say that some Antivirus products really, really suck and take up tons of CPU and have single-threading bottlenecks, so that if you have the RTV scanner turned on, you will give back a lot of the performance gains. (I'm talking about the one that installs 19 different drivers and services. Someone in IT got a kickback on that purchase).
I'd pit this SSD against a mechanical hard drive in a laptop any day of the week. It can take all sorts of bumps, bounces, heat, etc that could kill a HDD. Better battery life, increased performance. At 160GB, it is about 100GB less than the HDDs they are installing in new laptops, but other than that it is better in every way.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
The manufacturer data sheet is pretty much the polar opposite of "real-world usage reports... under a range of... duty cycles".
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?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I keep hearing people claim reliability issues when SSD articles come along to slashdot.
I have never seen a citation, so I went looking for them via Google but could only find citations attesting to the high reliability of these devices.
Dell's Lionel Menchaca stated in 2008, when it was reported by Avian Securities that Dell was having SSD reliability issues, "Our global reliability data shows that SSD drives [that we shipped] are equal to or better than traditional hard disk drives we've shipped." He further notes that Avian Securities never contacted them and that their numbers were a complete fabrication.
At this point I consider any claims that SSD's are less reliable to simply be a myth derived from dishonest reporting.
Furthermore, there are published studies detailing how unreliable traditional magnetic platter drives are.
Do they have write limits? Yes. Can other parts of the device fail? Yes. Are they more expensive than economy platters? Yes. Is there real world data showing that they are less reliable as claimed? Apparently not.
"His name was James Damore."
Bear in mind that when a hard disk fails you typically loose at least some of your written data
No you don't, your data is NOT loosed, it's locked up so tight even you can get at it. You loose your data when you publish it, you lose your data when your hard drive dies.
Hope I was a help. What's your native language?
Free Martian Whores!
People who tune large databases have been IOPS focused for a long time. SSDs enable a new level of IOPS that is about one to two orders of magnitude better than spinning disks. SSDs will allow people to (re)consider all sorts of applications that are currently IOPS bound or IOPS prohibited. Soon Google will be able to keep track of how much milk you have in your fridge, and send you a reminder to buy some when you are near a store that sells it, and have plans to go home afterward so that they can be sure you will be able to refrigerate it.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704901104575423294099527212.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
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.
Certain models of Adaptec controllers with recent firmware (since April 2010) support SSDs and platter drives on the same mirror array (RAID 1 or 10). The controller intelligently sends all reads to the SSD unless it goes offline. It's not at all an advertised feature, I have only ever seen mention of it in the firmware release notes. Note that this is not the same thing as what their "MAXIQ" product does, which is essentially add more cache to the controller in the form of a small SSD attached to one of the controller's ports.
There are multiple people out there (including Linus Torvolds, Jeff Atwood, and some random poster in this story)
BTW, if you want citations:
Linus on his Intel:
Jeff Atwood (admittedly, where I saw Linus quoted):
Random /.'er rabtech: