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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.
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?
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
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.
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
mSATA is physically, but not electrically, compatible with miniPCIe slots.
It will fit, but will probably cause your system to catch on fire.
Have fun!
mSATA is physically, but not electrically, compatible with miniPCIe slots.
Then the designers screwed that up. A CompactFlash card can operate in both PCMCIA and parallel ATA modes.
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."
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..
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.
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