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."

Comments

Re:Any update in terms of long run use?

[gumbi west]

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.

Re:Any update in terms of long run use?

[Rockoon]

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.