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Intel 310 Series Mini SSDs Now Shipping, Benchmark
MojoKid writes "Intel's new 310 Series SSDs utilize the same 34nm NAND flash memory technology and controller found on the chip maker's 2.5-inch SSDs, but in a form factor just 1/8th the size; a scant 2 inches (51mm) long by 1.18 inches (30mm) wide and flatter than a pancake. The new tiny Intel SSDs are now shipping and despite their diminutive stature, performance is actually pretty similar to that of the company's popular X25-M 34nm SSD. Intel says the 310 Series is shipping to customers for $179 in 1,000-unit quantities for the 80GB version of the drive."
As a European reader, I haven't really gotten my head around those imperial units yet. How many mm would this pancake measurement of yours represent?
The icon is an old 9-track tape... on a story about tiny tiny new Solid State storage.
there's irony or something like that in the air.
I'm curious as to the continued widespread use of "flatter than a pancake" as a technical unit of measure, considering that a specific mm width and length were just previously mentioned. Not to be a nitpicker, I just prefer my pancakes to be somewhat light and fluffy, and therefore not flat. Perhaps "flatter than a tortilla" would be more apt? Though if we're going this route, I continue to back the opinion that "shitload" be considered a unit of measure ;)
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
you are comparing apples and oranges. That 3.5" drives are the size of an old cassette player. these SSD are almost credit card sized (a bit thicker, maybe 4 credit cards stacked on top of one another). 80Gb is enough for business users. U can carry your music and other media on your iPhone... So if you like a small, easy to carry laptop, it should be designed for these SSD only, and no HDD. Then you can still have the bigger cheaper laptops with 2.5" HDD for cost or max storage capability.
Yes but none of those things are about the size of a 50 cent piece. This is.
And if your workload consists primarily of random reads you get:
SSD: 187 random reads / second / dollar
HDD: 1.4 random reads / second / dollar
SSD looks like a much better value to me.
What I find hilarious is that the mSATA is physically identical to a PCIe card edge, but is not electrically identical.
I wonder how many returns they are going to get on these.
1) Almost any of the SSDs currently on the market will smoke any of the above drives performance-wise, even the 10k RPM ones
2) This particular SSD is a fraction of the size of those drives. You just listed a whole bunch of 3.5" drives, these are significantly smaller than even 2.5" notebook drives.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Actually, these SSDs are much smaller than a credit card, and not much thicker.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
RTFA. First off, you wouldn't, you would buy a 2.5" SSD. However, Intel provided the testers with an interposer card than includes a standard SATA connection.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
that's all wasted space and power drain for half of laptop users. many of us don't store multimedia crap on our laptop. We just want OS and apps and a few gig for data. I'm glad the price is finally getting within reach
and why is the 80gb faster than the 40gb version of the otherwise identical product?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=Intel+310&x=0&y=0
THL phish sticks
What I want is a combination of a large-capacity spinning drive and an SSD in a single housing that's no larger than current 2,5" drives. The SSD should be large enough for the OS + frequently-used apps and data.
The Seagate Momentus XT sort of offers this, but it uses its SSD as a disk cache, so there's no way to influence what gets put on the SSD. And 4 GB is too small: my Hibernation file alone is 4 GB. Also, it has some weird auto-sleep features that make life difficult when you put it in a Mac.
What I want is one physical box (so it'll fit in a laptop) that exposes two separate volumes so I can decide for myself what to put where. 500 GB RD [1] + 32 GB SSD would be sufficient.
1: Rotating Disk, to allow us to talk about spinning rust drives with as much brevity as 'SSD'.
Spoken like someone who never used one SSD. I was exactly like you, dismissing SSDs as hype. Until I got an OCZ Vertex 2 60GB for less than 100$. My opinion has shifted dramatically, yes windows boots up fast, but it's not just that. Every program installed on SSD boots fast, the system is much snappier, it almost feels like it was an iPad, wake up from sleep takes less than a second. As for price / GB, yes it's steep, but if you keep only applications and OS on the SSD, the price is well worth it.
Is this still limited to usage in netbooks and laptops? What type of dimensions are in an Ipad or the new ASUS eee Slate? I would love to be able to upgrade the drives in those, it's almost the only thing holding the asus windows slate back.
At my workplace, we replaced most of the devs' spinny disks with SSDs. SVN checkouts went down from about 5 minutes to around 30 seconds, with most of that being due to the SVN server not having an SSD. Other tasks across thousands of files have reduced by heaps as well. On average, easily an hour or two can be saved per developer per week, which pays for itself within a month. Developers don't need more than that kind of size, typically, and large files, like database backups can be kept on the old HDD if space really becomes an issue. The main issue has been a ridiculously high failure rate (over 10% in around 3 months), in this case with Corsair disks, though I don't know if the problem is limited to that brand or the particular model. Also, the lower power consumption and quieter operation are features that nobody could argue with. 10krpm spinny hard drives might not be too much slower for some operations than SSDs, but they are certainly a lot louder and thirsty.
I'm gonna need a spec.
$200 for 80gb?
you can get 2 TB HDD for that price or 146 GB 15K HDDs as well.
Western Digital VelociRaptor WDBACN3000ENC-NRSN 300GB 10000 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive is about $200 as well.
I know, eh! I decided to put a 3.5 inch high performance desktop drive into my laptop.
First problem: Hard drive didn't fit.
Solution: Duct tape it to the laptop, wire SATA cables. Option two would have been cramming it into the chassis somehow.
Second problem: Voltage. Vast majority of laptops don't have 12 Volt SATA lines.
Solution: Wire some more cables from an adapter of some sort!
Third problem: Laptop now looks really funky with the duct taped hard drive. Oh and is much heavier!
Solution: Don't know, any suggestions?
But hey, I managed to do it! Cramming a desktop drive into a laptop!
and why is the 80gb faster than the 40gb version of the otherwise identical product?
The way they double the capacity is by using twice as many of the same chips. Since it writes to all chips in parallel, twice as many chips means it can read/write twice as much data in the same time period. You see that in the fact that the write performance spec is exactly double. The reason the read performance isn't double is because it has been known for a while that Intel puts a performance cap on the non-enterprise versions of their SSDs
Assuming I have a free PCIe slot on my laptop, can I assume that everything will work or do I need some specific feature on the laptop for it to work?
Or pay an extra $100 for another 16GB in your iPhone 4.
I suppose to do it properly, moving parts are required for fucking.
Bit of a Freud slip there, Taco?
Only if Intel had said "thinner than a pancake" about the SSD, I could have sued them after making a petite pancake definitely thinner than that SSD.
The company I work for is occassionally bleeding edge. They purchased quite a number of earlier 160GB Intel 2.5 inch units, and every single one has failed within 18 months. In a first or second gen product, especially bleeding edge arena, we cut people some slack. But Intel have not been good _at_all in terms of warranty, and the base fact is I don't think we have any interest in ever dealing with Intel again in the SSD area. We can tolerate the breakage, its part of being leading edge, but the failure to back the product up in a way thats acceptable is a no no.
Given the hype, frankly we expect 5 years from a unit roughly, and the fact every single one died fills us with a view that these have inherent breakage, and cold shoulder warranty. Not good enough.
We`re all equal
The icon for voice mail is a tape loop. Would you rather the icon be a molecular-sized transistor?
How about the back of an envelope with a symbol of a phone handset on it? That combines the icons for "phone" and "mail".
flatter then a Crepe.
My pancakes are fluffy and think.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Metric shitload, or English?
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Would this new SSD be small enough to be combined with a 1.8" HDD into the size of a 2.5" HDD?
Whats that? you paid 20 million for a fighter jet? I can get a flight across the country foe 1000 bucks!
Maybe the are for different purposes?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Third problem: Laptop now looks really funky with the duct taped hard drive. Oh and is much heavier!
Solution: Don't know, any suggestions?
Duct tape some helium balloons to it, which will also help to insulate the heat of the drives from your lap.
All pancakes aside, I'm surprised it took them this long. Everyone had to have assumed SD card sized drives were on the way when SSDs were introduced.
Those old VelociRaptors arent even competitive with a modern 2TB 7,200K RPM consumer drive like the Caviar Black in performance (which is less than $200)
Even ignoring SSD's, that class of 10000 RPM drive has been eliminated from the performance market by the higher capacity 7200 RPM drives. The main issue is that while 10K RPM still gives better seek times, that same RPM also keeps them from using the highest drive densities. 7200 RPM at a higher density beats 10000 RPM at a lower density on raw throughput.
So what we end up with is that the Raptor's having no market any longer. For throughput they are no longer competitive with larger and cheaper drives, and for IOPS they are simply a joke compared to even thumb drives. There is no market for consumer-grade 10K RPM like there was in the past.
The only 10K+ RPM drives that are still successful are enterprise-class, and those aren't cheaper than SSD's. Some enterprise drives can be had for ~$1/GB but so too some SSD's can be had for that, and most enterprise-class drives will run you ~$2/GB.
The shortcoming of SSD's is that they carry an enterprise price tag but do not carry the same enterprise-level guarantees, but that is offset by the significant performance advantages that they do offer.
Essentially, you are reaching for yesteryears trendy performance geek stuff and trying to apply it to todays performance geek stuff. Performance geeks have been using SSD's for several years now, and thats simply not going to swing back towards platters... ever.
"His name was James Damore."
The same can be said for Linux on an SSD. I have the same 60GB Vertex2 in two boxes here, and it takes roughly 4 seconds from the moment GRUB loads to the moment I see the XFCE desktop, plus perhaps 5 seconds to re-load my session. Counting the POST screen, I'd give it a grand total of 15 seconds from power-on to ready and idle.
Everything moves faster - I don't find myself waiting anymore. Except for Firefox, programs load from a cold start almost instantly. Since the CPU is more than capable of flooding even the fastest disks, programs that need to process large files just blast through the data faster. New programs install lightning fast. I've seen at least one instance of a several-GB file being created at ~249 MB/sec - right up there with the benchmarks we've all seen for SSD's. I can "only" get about 210 MB/sec out of dd or hdparm, though. Of course it takes no effort at all now to max out our gigabit LAN copying files around as usual (~110 MB/sec on larger files).
It took no special effort to get this kind of performance either, at least with Ubuntu "Maverick": just partition, install, and copy my data over like any other disk update.
SSD for the OS's and most of the home directory contents on the two machines, spinning rust for mass storage, external USB disk for incremental backups. Seems like the perfect solution for a normal home user, at least for now.
In 1985 a 10 meg harddrive for the commodore 64 cost $600.... 60 dollars a meg!! You could buy 1600+ floppies for that.. and use both sides of them... No wonder harddrives never caught on..
I just hope they aren't so small they get lost, like both of my sd to usb adapters: http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0313669
I wonder what SSD has done to sales of "high-performance" disk drives like VelociRaptors? Who would pay a premium for a faster version of a technology that is inherently slow?
A few years ago now, I predicted 3-5 years for SSDs to start killing the server market - starting with the 10k RPM drives used for high random outs.
I'm not sure if I can call it a failure or not - I also predicted 3-5 before 'major penetration' of SSDs into laptops happened. While most laptops are still using 2.5 inch drives, iPod is pretty much the driver for the smaller drives(1.8") right now. The iPad is run by flash though. Even 'netbooks' mostly have HD's in them.
Maybe this will finally kill the HD in the iPod classic, but looking at the price profiles ($249 for 80GB and $349 for 160), a $100 price difference for 80GB, I'd say that the Intel SSD needs to drop in price by 1/2.
Going by relative advances, I'd have to say another 2-4 years.
SSDs will bypass consumer/bulk data 3.5" drives last, of course. In situations where it's all about the price per GB, performance being a distant second, plain old 3.5" drives are going to dominate for a while.
I don't read AC A human right
OK great, you made them smaller Intel that's just peachy. Now they can be used in other types of applications such as phones and other devices...
HOWEVER, the big problem with SSD is 1) PRICE and 2) CAPACITY...
Soooo what you did here, was make a smaller, slower, MORE expensive and LESS capacity SSD? Bravo.
How about you get working on making a standard 2.5" 300GB SSD not cost about the same as your first born's eternal soul.
k thx bye.
$200 for 80gb?
you can get 2 TB HDD for that price or 146 GB 15K HDDs as well.
Ummm... yeah, try putting a 3.5" drive in a mini-notebook. What this $200 gets us is PC's notebooks that will be able to compete with MacBook Airs or Notebooks that can have both an SSD (for fast / instant boot capability and longer battery life) and a HD (for user storage) without being any larger. Making a notebook smaller, faster and have longer battery life is something A LOT of people will pay a mere $200 for.
That's why they shouldn't let sophomores be composition professors, obviously. Wait until they're graduated.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
As it is nearly 1/4 inch, 5.8mm is considerably thicker than any credit card.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Around 1993, I paid £30 for a 128KB SSD. It was a single cell, so you needed to periodically reformat (erase) it to reclaim space (each time you saved a file, you wrote a new copy, you didn't overwrite the old one). That was £240/MB. The price has halved roughly every 9 months since then, on average.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
50 points for the first person to build a micro linux box that caches access to a spindle disk with this SSD, having the micro linux box exposed via sata to a host.
... a free sample of K-Y Jelly.
Well, I'm off to the airport.
Well, besides the tiny size that I personally don't care about, these SSDs should provide IOPS that would embarrass your Velociraptor mirror. However, I forgive you for not realizing that because most internet hardware hardware reviews-- like this one-- get stuck on one favored metric and don't get the whole picture or understand the value of applications beyond a standard desktop or laptop. I/Os per second might be rolled into one of the benchmark suites, but I wouldn't know because they don't mention it.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The market for consumer 10000 RPM drives is almost completely eradicated. They are down to about $0.50/GB now at best, but thats also the awkward capacities like 600GB.
That capacity is awkward because if you are throwing $300 at performance storage from the consumer space, then you are a fool to choose any single platter vs a 160GB SSD like the OCZ Vertex 2 (over 2 times as much bandwidth and 180 times as many IOPS vs any 10000 RPM drive.)
Combine this with the pressure from the 2 TB 7200 RPM platters which have the same or better throughput and only marginally worse IOPS than the 10000 RMP's, and doing it for only $100, and well... you see the point that you can RAID several of these 2TB 7200's for less than a 10000 RPM and get much better performance (which is why I said "single platter" in the previous paragraph)
Basically I'm saying that the 10000 RPM drives like the VelociRaptor were attacked from both sides. There is simply no room in between the cheap-but-similarly-performing 2TB platters (at $0.05/GB) and the SSD's (at $1.70/GB)
"His name was James Damore."
Are there any PATA adapter cards? It would extend the life of PATA-based notebooks even though the throughput would be limited.
Highly agree. It was difficult to convince the "IT Manager" that these "expensive toys" were worth it but evidence is compelling.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.