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Intel Intros 310 Series Mini SSDs
crookedvulture writes "Intel has added a couple of tiny 310 Series solid-state drives to its storage lineup. Measuring just 51 x 30 x 5.8mm, the mini-SATA SSDs are about a tenth the size of a standard notebook hard drive. Impressively, their performance ratings track with full-sized SSDs. Intel is pushing the 310 Series as a solution for dual-drive notebooks that combine solid-state and mechanical storage to give users the best of both worlds. Next-gen notebooks just got a little more interesting."
Hopefully I'm not the only one the read the title as "Intel intros 310 mini series"
I was excited as these appear to be Mini PCIe cards, but then I was disappoint as it looks like it's a SATA connector that shares the form factor. It's not entirely clear, though.
10 of them in a raid in a laptop?
Why is it impressive that a smaller solid state drive performs as well as a standard size one? What does the size have to do with anything relating to these performance benchmarks?
A couple of these suckers in a RAID 0 would certainly be pretty speedy.
Perhaps you don't know that Windows (Vista confirmed, 7 should too) can map a seperate drive to a folder instead of a drive letter, if you tell it to. It is rather easy to do. You can even setup multiple paths for a single drive if you want.
I suppose a small size that performs well is impressive because smaller and lighter are attributes prized in laptops along with it's performance. Although performance is still the main quality we all want..
Its funny because years ago MSFT briefed us DEC guys on their brand new WNT OS which had so much DEC technology in it. And I did ask why the disk device names had to follow Windows95 (and DOS). I didn't get a good answer but I suppose the reason was backwards compatibility.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
It goes back at least as far as XP, probably 2000 if you don't need the Fisher-Price skin...
Now, just to get back to the bigotry and one-upsmanship, any setup that forces the user to think about how best to allocate filesystem stuff between block devices, or forces them to commit to one inflexible configuration, is arguably underutilizing the capabilities of this sort of technology.
Machines are, unless the human really wants to, supposed to handle the grunt work(not to mention, keeping accurate track of file accesses, speed and latency of multiple devices, etc. properly is really beyond the capabilities of a human, at least in realtime).
What you really want is an FS arrangement that can seamlessly present you with a single logical volume, silently handling the details of what to commit to flash and what to platter, for optimal performance and responsiveness without the cost of going all Flash.
I can't believe it either ... but there is a whole industry dedicated to dealing with windows. But it's the way our world works, sadly.
We create artificial scarcity, force people to use an inferior and limited technology, that has ridiculous drawbacks, and requires a tremendous workforce around it just to keep it functional. And we keep people using it even when there are cheaper, infinitely better, more reliable and future-proof technologies. The reason is simple: Through artificial scarcity, we keep the money flowing in a certain direction, we keep control in the same hands, and we create hugely profitable but completely pointless industries.
Think about it, we could be running 100% on clean, future-proof, secure and cheap nuclear energy. Instead, we rely on oil. The infrastructure that oil demands is huge, the drawbacks are incredible, we are polluting the environment, drilling the oceans to get some more black juice out of the earth at a huge risk.
We could also have moved all of our communications to ip-based networks, cutting down costs, and removing the need for so many different networks. We could have a single infrastructure that would provide us with high-bandwidth, low-latency internet everywhere, and put everything from phone calls to TV through that network. Instead, we are running different networks for each purpose, and within each purpose different networks for each provider. If we re-purposed all cellphone towers from all providers to give us just internet access, we could have 100% coverage everywhere in the world. Instead, we have huge overlapping (areas serviced by several providers), and huge areas with no coverage at all.
We could also be using just Free Software. It's open, transparent, reliable, cheap, and ethical. Instead, most people use windows. That means triplicating new hardware purchases, cutting 70% on hardware's lifespan, spending incredible resources in pointless activities like antivirus production/sale/deployment, and an IT structure several times bigger than required, not to mention all the lost time and profit due to preventable downtime.
But it's the way the economy works. It's the way the usual people keep getting richer, while keeping the majority of the world in line, quite and productive.
It's absolutely sad, but it's not just something that happens only in software, and it's certainly no accident.
Directory linking goes back to Windows 2000 but mapping c:\Users to it is a bit more difficult as the currently logged in users profile is always in use thus locking the folder. I guess you might be able to do it remotely though if none of the system processes have it open. Alternatively if it was a single user workstation you could log in as admin and just link that users folder to the drive. Personally I just put temp, pagefile and the readboost cache on my SSD as my general files are not the thing that needs the speedup.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Yep, like ZFS and L2ARC or EMC's FAST Cache, I don't want to have to think about which are the hot blocks, I just want the hot blocks to almost always be in cache. This is definitely where the high end storage market is going (and the really high end has always kind of been there with largish NV ram cache).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
as my pecker.
This goes back to DOS for christ sakes.
"His name was James Damore."
With grown up OSs that aren't stupid enough to map the physical drive layout to the logical file layout, these hybrid drives are a no brainer, just change the fstab to point /home(/Users for macheads :P) to the hd and / to the ssd. Done! However in Windows you now would have to contend with your drive being divided amongst 2 drive letters and all the registry hell that goes along with it.
Except that your / is full of small files and your /home/[user]/Documents are also full of small files that'd be much better off on a SSD, while all the help files on / that I hardly ever use and media files in your home folder should go on the HDD.
P.S. While the TARDIS tricks you can pull off on "grown up" OSs can be useful, they're hell to make sense of and make very simple questions have very complicated answers. Like for example, do I have the space to copy in these 30 GB of files? Well that depends, you only have 10 GB free on / but it's bigger on the inside and there may even be more disks being mounted somewhere under /home again. So you can copy in a bunch of files to a subdirectory and still have just as much free space, as if you were a magician pouring water into a hankerchief. Windows is simple, you have your drives and the more you put in them the fuller they get which is very straightforward to understand.
P.P.S. Your setup describes how most Windows machines are set up in a corporate setting, the apps on C:\ and your profile and/or my documents redirected to the network. Kinda silly to pretend that's not possible.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sorry to repost this, but I accidentally posted it as AC, and nobody is going to see it at -1.
I can't believe it either ... but there is a whole industry dedicated to dealing with windows. But it's the way our world works, sadly.
We create artificial scarcity, force people to use an inferior and limited technology, that has ridiculous drawbacks, and requires a tremendous workforce around it just to keep it functional. And we keep people using it even when there are cheaper, infinitely better, more reliable and future-proof technologies. The reason is simple: Through artificial scarcity, we keep the money flowing in a certain direction, we keep control in the same hands, and we create hugely profitable but completely pointless industries.
Think about it, we could be running 100% on clean, future-proof, secure and cheap nuclear energy. Instead, we rely on oil. The infrastructure that oil demands is huge, the drawbacks are incredible, we are polluting the environment, drilling the oceans to get some more black juice out of the earth at a huge risk.
We could also have moved all of our communications to ip-based networks, cutting down costs, and removing the need for so many different networks. We could have a single infrastructure that would provide us with high-bandwidth, low-latency internet everywhere, and put everything from phone calls to TV through that network. Instead, we are running different networks for each purpose, and within each purpose different networks for each provider. If we re-purposed all cellphone towers from all providers to give us just internet access, we could have 100% coverage everywhere in the world. Instead, we have huge overlapping (areas serviced by several providers), and huge areas with no coverage at all.
We could also be using just Free Software. It's open, transparent, reliable, cheap, and ethical. Instead, most people use windows. That means triplicating new hardware purchases, cutting 70% on hardware's lifespan, spending incredible resources in pointless activities like antivirus production/sale/deployment, and an IT structure several times bigger than required, not to mention all the lost time and profit due to preventable downtime.
But it's the way the economy works. It's the way the usual people keep getting richer, while keeping the majority of the world in line, quite and productive.
It's absolutely sad, but it's not just something that happens only in software, and it's certainly no accident.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Actually, what we really need is an OS that maps all memory the into one contiguous map, from fastest, to slowest and put the files rarely used on the slowest media and the ones used towards the fastest. But also include knowledge of memory that is temporary and fast verses slow (tape) and/or even unavailable (network shares) seamlessly as one huge pile.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yeah, and everyone who disagrees with you is stupid. It's all so beautiful in your head!
You've gotta be at least partially retarded to think it's some sort of conspiracy though.
This has been a feature since microsoft introduced NTFS. Which is long before vista.
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
Correct. They are called Volume Mount Points, and they were introduced in Windows 2000 (ten years ago). You can mount non-NTFS drives as a folder on an NTFS drive. It even works on USB drives and CD/DVD drives (so you could have /dev/cdrom).
I have a feeling that it may have been possible to do with the filesystem in NT 6, but there was no user interface for it.
I wonder how much that primitive joke of an "operating system" will derail the widespread adoption of these hybrid technologies.
The primitive joke of an operating system that introduced USB-flash based application acceleration (no such similar feature for any free operating system, and supported SSD TRIM commands before any other operating system? (OS X still doesn't and there are no announced plans to; Linux 2.6.32+, I believe, does only on a kernel level, but support amongst various filesystems seems inconsistent or not present; it's hard to tell. hdparm supports manually running TRIM using areas reported by the filesystem as free, but that's hardly equivalent to Windows, which "just works".)
Please help metamoderate.
Directory linking goes back to Windows 2000 but mapping c:\Users to it is a bit more difficult as the currently logged in users profile is always in use thus locking the folder.
There are quite a few ways to deal with this issue:
There are also tools from Microsoft designed to automate installs that will allow the mapping to be set at install time.
There's a lot of things I don't like about Windows, but have you actually tried Windows in the past 10+ years or are you really that ignorant? Almost all applications work just fine running somewhere other than C:\Program Files. I've been doing it for 12+ years and have never hit an application that had issues running off another drive.
In the MS world, perhaps. But I know FreeBSD supports it and I don't think they added that after they split from UNIX.
You don't really need tools for it. MS allows you to use the WINNT.SIF file for that purpose. It's also a convenient way to do all sorts of other adjustments that wouldn't work properly when done post install. It goes back to at least Windows 2000.
You should be able to do what you're describing with group policy. It's designed more for roaming profiles, but it should work for moving c:\users off of an SSD.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Only thing is, it doesn't work that way in Windows simply because the damn / folder is part of the /user data folder. Due to that, you have to map each users /home folder on an individual basis and mapping more then a couple of folders/drives will slow boot/shutdown times considerably. Another issue is "Unlike *nix" MS didn't see fit to isolate the damn /root "/admin" folder from the /home "/user data" folder, meaning you simply can't relocate /home "/user data" to another drive.
Another issue is that the folder/drive mapping is on a user by user basis and the reason it slows shit down is the fact that Windows wants to cache the data from those mapped locations in the offline cache location. So now it copies all of that data back into "C" drive because the idiots at MS couldn't take a page from the *nix folks and use a design that's trully engineered for multiple users. I've got Vista (32/64) Win7 (32/64) and both Pro/Ultimate do not make it easy to do any of that.
Oh I'll admit that there may be some third party tools that could do it but they'll probably cost more then I can afford or the local mom and pop shop is willing to spend on IT infrastructure.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
I wonder how much that primitive joke of an "operating system" will derail the widespread adoption of these hybrid technologies. With grown up OSs that aren't stupid enough to map the physical drive layout to the logical file layout, these hybrid drives are a no brainer, just change the fstab to point /home(/Users for macheads :P) to the hd and / to the ssd. Done! However in Windows you now would have to contend with your drive being divided amongst 2 drive letters and all the registry hell that goes along with it. Not to mention the fact that a large # of applications simply fail if everything isn't on C:\
Again, windows will probably hold up the rest of us from evolving long enough so that they can write another hack to make their shitty "operating system" work. Why, why are people still putting up with such hard to use primitive bullshit? Linux is infinitely easier to use than Windows ever was
If your going to make fun of windows at least have a logical argument and your facts straight.
You can do a volume set in windows to combine space on multiple drives into one logical partition. You can also do mount points where separate partitions are folders under the c: drive the same as linux.
Your comment regarding physical vs logical separation makes no sense because on both systems you are separating disk space into containers it is just the trivial representation (folder vs drive letter or folder vs folder) that can be the same or different... there is still no unifed access without a volume/span set on either platform.
Figuring out free space inside a *NIX system isn't that hard. Just because you lack algorithmic imagination doesn't mean it's difficult.
By size, do they mean volume?
Their they're doing there hair.
There always seems to be one showstopper that actually needs to run from C: that in my case has often been the application that the computer was purchased to run in the first place. It's meant things like re-installing Windows7 to only have a single partition so that software written in 2010 ends up on the system drive. It should not happen but it frequently does, is very annoying and it will be a few years before developers grow out of hard coding things to be on the C: drive and requiring to run as Administrator.
MS Office, openoffice etc don't care but there are still a lot of badly written applications out there that depend on the single user, non networked mindset that was out of date before MSDOS existed.
Wow! you can't make that stuff up...
Perhaps you don't know that Windows (Vista confirmed, 7 should too) can map a seperate drive to a folder instead of a drive letter, if you tell it to. It is rather easy to do. You can even setup multiple paths for a single drive if you want.
I don't remember if a third party software was involved, but you could do this in Windows 95 and even DOS (or was it DR-DOS, not sure). Unfortunately the drive would still occupy a drive letter as well as the folder, so it wouldn't fix drive-letter-hell. Being able to do something, does not always mean that it is easy enough to bother with, "mount" is extremely easy to use and a very versatile everyday tool for me and I'm just a humble home computer user. I haven't used Windows recently (since W98), but I would guess it isn't as simple nor as useful, as it is in unix-like operating systems. even in more recent versions of Windows .
Just a quick note for you guys that like to fiddle with miniature screw-drivers and such: you can always replace your optical drive with an SSD or HDD. It seems that newmodeus has this market cornered for a while, restricting you to a higher priced product, but it is certainly a viable option. I've left my HDD where it is at because of possible heat issues (although there is quite a lot of spare room in the caddy) and possible problems with warranty. The only drawback is that you have to put your movies on HDD pre-flight or that you will have to take an external optical drive with you.
There are limitations to the mounting of drives in a separate directory under XP and Server 2003. Not sure if it also affects Vista/7/Server 2008. Some software insists that the destination directory only correlates to the boot drive and not the physical disk forcing a duplicate mount as another drive letter so they see that I have enough space. Overall, it's better than having many drive letters.
Now, just to get back to the bigotry and one-upsmanship, any setup that forces the user to think about how best to allocate filesystem stuff between block devices, or forces them to commit to one inflexible configuration, is arguably underutilizing the capabilities of this sort of technology.
ZFS pools to the rescue! :)
I hate having to choose between an SSD and an HDD for a laptop and really want one of each. I want a nice big 500+ GB HDD but I always want a 40+ GB SSD for a boot/OS/applications/page partition i.e., the "C" drive. Then you really get the best of both worlds because you get the insanely fast IO speeds of SSD but you have somewhere to put large data files.
"I was excited as these appear to be Mini PCIe cards" - by DurendalMac (736637) on Wednesday December 29, @10:25PM (#34706832)
I hear you: The last time I was "excited" about a SSD product though, was THIS one (never came to market):
DDRdrive uses PCIe to increase speed of mainstream solid state disks
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/ddrdrive-ssd-announced-q1,2195.html
This was "in the makings", back in 2006, but it never came to market... I was BADLY disappointed! I already have & use:
---
1.) A CENATEK RocketDrive 2gb PCI-133 SDRAM based "true SSD" PCI bus based (133mb/sec)
2.) GIGABYTE IRAM 4gb DDR2 RAM based "true SSD" SATA 1 bus based (150mb/sec)
Both drives are used for:
A. pagefile.sys placement
B. %temp/tmp% ops via environment variable set
C. %comspec% location
D. system logs (like eventlogs, which ARE moveable)
E. application logs (app logging)
F. all webbrowser caches
G. print spooler location
---
(I say 'true SSD', because none of these units use FLASH memory on them, which has slower write cycles typically)
The PCI-e based DDRDrive X1 however?
It was going to use the immensely FASTER PCI-e bus... & faster RAM than my CENATEK RocketDrive, in DDR memory: I was "saving my pennies" for it in fact, but again, it NEVER came out to market!
What a shame!
APK
P.S.=> One of these days though, you KNOW someone's going to make a SSD that doesn't use FLASH RAM, & thus has instantly FAST writes too (faster than FLASH RAM does @ least), as well as screaming fast reads + access times, & one that uses the PCI-e bus too, only a matter of time... apk
The "join" command in DOS could do this too... way back in the 90's...
Like for example, do I have the space to copy in these 30 GB of files? Well that depends, you only have 10 GB free on / but it's bigger on the inside and there may even be more disks being mounted somewhere under /home again.
The df command will tell you how much space is available on each block device and lists the mount point for the device. If you pass it the "-h" argument it conveniently gives you the sizes in the more human readable MB, GB, etc abbreviations instead of listing the number of 1k blocks.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
I have a computer that will boot just fine but will not communicate with either the mouse or keyboard. It does not manner if they are ps/2 or usb. I tried a usb pci board and even tried an external usb device. Once I boot I see the computer on my network so it must be some sort of motherboard problem. Why shouldn't I be able to purchase a bare bones computer and transfer the hard drive, optical disk and memory and just turn it on and be back to where I was before the problem? I can not do that since it was a vista computer and the hard drive will not boot in a new computer. So I have to purchase another computer with a new copy of vista or 7 and than remove the hard drive from the old computer and set it up as a secondary drive to the new computer's hard drive so I have my old data. But I still have to reinstall all of my programs. That is a lot of work so Microsoft can sell two copies of their operating system. I also have a lexmark printer that still works fine but lexmark will not update the drive to windows 7 or vista so either I throw away the printer or maintain a windows xp system just to use the printer. There are no drivers for Ubuntu either. So I see your point and agree with you.
Since you seem such an idealist, are you interested in the Haiku OS?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Are you sure you can't get the printer to work on GNU/Linux?
Maybe there's no exact driver for that printer, but a similar one might work.
I've yet to come across a printer that won't work right with GNU/Linux and CUPS.
Try connecting it to a GNU/Linux install and use similar drivers for it, odds are, it'll work just fine.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
We do this in multiple ways where I work. STFU
You don't really need tools for it. MS allows you to use the WINNT.SIF file for that purpose.
I don't think you can do the job with just WINNT.SIF, since you need a disk with two partitions.
The config options in WINNT.SIF allow you to tell Windows Setup to either wipe the disk completely and use the whole drive or to use first empty space, but you can't do anything else. If you want a custom partition layout, that has to happen before WINNT.SIF is being parsed.
your lack of knowledge about this doesn't mean you're right. It's easy to automate. You dont need third party software, microsoft includes it out of the box. Money should be spent on knowledge not tools.
move along, nothing to see here.