Slashdot Mirror
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."
lolwut
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?
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.
Monstar L
A couple of these suckers in a RAID 0 would certainly be pretty speedy.
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..
as my pecker.
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.
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.
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.
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