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Intel Unveils SSDs With 6Gbit/Sec Throughput
CWmike writes "Intel announced a new line of solid-state drives (SSDs) on Monday that are based on the serial ATA (SATA) 3.0 specification, which doubles I/O throughput compared to previous generation SSDs. Using the SATA 3.0 specs, Intel's new 510 Series gets 6Gbit/sec. performance and thus can take full advantage of the company's transition to higher speed 'Thunderbolt' SATA bus interfaces on the recently introduced second generation Intel Core processor platforms. Supporting data transfers of up to 500MB/sec, the Intel SSD 510 doubles the sequential read speeds and more than triples the sequential write speeds of Intel's SATA 2.0 SSDs. The drives offer sequential write speeds of up to 315MB/sec."
If it's twice as fast as all the other SATA devices I have that are rated 3Gb/s then that'll only average about 40MB/s with peaks around 80MB/s..
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
on a (rich) consumer SSD. But, while I'm loving all the Marvell / Sandforce / Intel hypersonic speed-worthiness, how about a decently fast, really affordable solid state drive? How much longer will these be 20x the per GB cost of a HDD?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Your devices are not rated at 3Gb/s, the sata connection was. This device is..Supporting data transfers of up to 500MB/sec,....
Maybe just read the summary :)
Somebody is confused. Thunderbolt is DisplayPort and PCIe bundled together.
The SATA 3 ports on Cougar Point platform have nothing to do with Thunderbolt.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
I know this problem has (probably) been satisfactorily addressed but if one were to use such a super fast drive for an application that had extremely heavy usage (swap space for the OS or an program like Photoshop) wouldn't it cause those sectors to be read/written to many many times very quickly? Doesn't each "cell" have a limited number off times it can be accessed before it fails? (on the order of 100,000 i think). And wouldn't that case the drive to fail (sooner rather than later because it is so fast)?
Again, I'm sure the SSD drive manufacturers have looked at this problem very closely, I'm just concerned that's all. After all, even if your computer made only one error every billion instructions that would mean it would break down in less than a second!
Otherwise, I'm getting one of the 512GB drives for a smokin' fast laptop drive so I boot up lightening fast! (Time can never be recovered especially for an old fart like me).
ought to be severely reduced if you can pass the info off at those data rates to a similarly fast external drive.
Then if you want to archive to a "slow" spinning hard drive, the external SSD could supply the data at the slower rate of the HD
With some lazy writing to solid-state-chips.. :D
Yeah, I am dreaming.. Sigh!! :-/
When transferring files between SATA hard drives on my desktop I usually get around 90 MB/s. I suspect it's your devices that are the problem.
What happened to the 3rd generation SSDs that Intel was supposed to release this month? They were supposed to be using 25nm flash and offer roughly twice the space for the same price as the G2 drives. Using a new controller and upgrading things a bit seems a poor substitute for that.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
$584 for 256GB
I wonder why they outsourced their controller chip, previous incarnations used an Intel controller.
Guys, don't forget to take into account cached disk data/buffers, use free to see how much you've got. Just run hdparm -tT to see the difference between cached reads and non cached reads. If this sounds to technical just do a test with a 20 GB file. This should be enough to make sure cached disk data doesn't give you a false illusion of speed. Also read man hdparm under the -t section.
90 MB/s seems on the upper end to me while 40 MB/s is on the lower end but I have seen it with generic drivers.
Also, try to upgrade your SATA drivers to one that is designed specifically for the SATA controller you are using instead of using a generic one. Best bang for the buck if you are looking for speed.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
IOPS?
It's important to know.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Now that 6GBit/s SATA ports are becoming commonly available on motherboards it's only natural that SSDs follow. Normal HDs can't really take advantage of a 6Gb/s port but SSDs can. These high speed ports will make port multiplier enclosures more useful as well.
There's certainly a lot of use for this sort of thing. SSDs can already replace far more expensive DRAM (and the far more expensive motherboards needed to support lots of DRAM) for numerous problem sets, including mostly-read database accesses. This will significantly reduce the cost of server architectures for large swaths of problem areas.
What we are seeing is a natural progression.
-Matt
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The perfect compliment to Sandybridge
Actually, yeah. The problem with Cougar Point (the Platform Controller Hub that goes along with Sandy Bridge, not the Sandy Bridge chip itself, BTW) is with the SATA 3.0Gbps ports. So to get the maximum performance of these new SSDs, you wouldn't use those ports anyway.
How about a vicious piece of malware? Could a piece of code be written to circumvent the wear-leveling algorithm and carpet-bomb your SSD with repetitive writes so that it's worthless overnight? Could be a real PITA in cases like the Macbook AIR where the SSD drive is built into the mobo. It's not a case of just paying for a new SSD to replace. On the plus side, this type of hardware failure just limits additional writes to the device. You should still be able to retrieve your data.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
If you are averaging a sustained 20MB/sec, then your drive, controller, partition alignment, or drivers suck.. and by suck I mean really really really suck.
It is hard to imagine the great lengths of time you would have to invest in finding a collection of SATA 2.0 hardware that bad, so its almost certainly your partition alignment or drivers.
You do know that modern drives require 4096 byte partition alignment, while most older OS's presume that 512 byte is good enough?
"His name was James Damore."
It's been almost 30 months since the X-25e was launched and now the max 64GB capacity looks pathetic next to the competition so when will Intel launch their next generation SLC based SSD?
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Having been a somewhat early adopter of SSDs, I got bitten a couple of time by the JMicron bug
Everything I've read so far suggests that if you are buying SSDs you want to go with Intel.
Note that this new Intel SSD is the first Intel-branded SSD that uses a non-Intel controller. It uses the same Marvell controller used in the well-regarded Crucial RealSSD C300.
I've also read about Intel's great combo of performance and robustness, but that reputation is mostly a result of Intel's controllers. JMicron, a manufacturer of SSD controllers, got its buggy reputation from early JMicron-based SSDs. Marvell's controller performance has been proven in many reviews, but Intel's "endorsement" gives me more confidence in Marvell's reliability and robustness.
TO START
PRESS ANY KEY
Where's the 'ANY' key? I see Esk, Kitarl, and Pig-Up...
Sandforce has already announced its new sata3 controller. On paper it looks like it will have much faster sequential writes than Intel, but it sounds like it will also have a shorter lifetime and shorter data retention times due to the use of 25nm NAND. Intel is wisely sticking with 34nm. It may be more expensive to manufacture, but is superior tech. I can only hope that OCZ changes their mind and decides to at least offer a more expensive 34nm version. OCZ won't be shipping their Vertex 3 drives until Q2 so Intel will have a big head start in the market.
The NAND industry seems to be doing its best to encourage ignorance on the disadvantages of smaller process sizes from the consumer POV and the ignorance seems to be widespread. Getting the facts on this issue can be a bit difficult. Here is a good thread on the topic.
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2142742
The following post sums it up better than I could. Note his point about data retention times as well. That is a point that is often ignored when the focus is solely on write cycles.
As flash cells are shrunk, they become less good. This is a fundamental feature of the technology. The overall volume of the cell becomes smaller, so less electrons can be stored in the cell (so the signal picked up by the electronics is weaker and less clear, so you get a higher error rate) and the insulating barriers around the cell must be made thinner, in order to save space - allowing the electrons to leak out of the cell more easily (reducing power off data retention time). The thinner insulation also wears out more quickly (reducing life cycles)
It's difficult to define a 'fundamantal' limit for flash, because it may be possible to work around poor performance, and as yet unknown new manufacturing techniques and semiconductor materials may be developed. However, it has been suggested in the scientific literature that 18-22 nm, is the realistic limit. Beyond that, the performance/reliability/lifespan of the flash would be too poor, no matter how much wear levelling, and how sophisticated the ECC codes were.
Enterprise grade SSD flash, will need higher specifications than flash for toy cameras. Enterprise applications are unlikely to tolerate 18 nm flash with 100 write cycles and one lost sector per 100 GB of data stored. However, this probably would be acceptable for toys or throwaway devices.
Some more coverage of the topic:
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article/HONSHI/20090528/170920/
NAND Flash memory quality is also beginning to drop. Chips manufactured using 90nm-generation technology in 2004-05, for example, were assured for about 100,000 rewrites and data retention of about a decade. As multi-level architecture and smaller geometry are introduced, quality is showing a sharp decline. The 30nm 2-bit/cell chips expected to enter volume production in 2009-10 may well end up with a rewrite assurance of no more than 3,000 cycles, and a data retention time of about a year. The first 3-bit/cell chips are hitting the market now, with only a few hundred rewrites.
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1502663
Flash memory works by trapping electrons. Over time these electrons leak away, until the charge is too small for the data to be read any more. With smaller feature sizes (34 nm instead of 45 or 65 nm) this leakage is more significant and fewer electrons can be stored per bit, thus the time during which the stored value can be maintained is decreased.
http://www.corsair.com/blog/force25nm/
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
The SATA speed is 6Gb/s. The disk speed is 500MB/s. You can write to the disk itself at "only" 500MB/s. Since SATA doesn't have that exact speed they chose the next best thing: the 6Gb/s (=768 MB/s) SATA connection.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
But would you prefer it be used for good or awesome?
Give us fucking SAS already.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
By adding sync you are forcing all writes from cache to be flushed to its destination, making for a more accurate test..
time (dd if=test.bin of=/dev/null bs=131072; sync)
I have never heard of "sata mobos". I heard about motherboards that had a SATA controller hardwired into them. Using the right driver for that specific controller might help in gaining speed.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2016546&cid=35345062
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
"mostly a result of Intel's controllers"
Actually, the controller is just the hardware. It is the software running on it which makes it smart. Intel owns the software I would think.
New things are always on the horizon
Oh. Er. Why?
Or, like most people these days, he's using a laptop. 30MB/s is about the fastest I've seen from a laptop drive, and that was when it was completely new so every write was a sequential write. That said, sequential speed is pretty much irrelevant these days. Even cheap hard drives are fast enough that something else (typically the network) is usually the bottleneck when doing sequential reads or writes. Random read / write speed is much more important - on a mechanical disk this can be as low as 100KB/s (seek after every read and you're closer to 50KB/s, even if your read / write operations are infinitely fast), which absolutely cripples performance in a lot of cases.
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OCZ on the other hand only offers an .EXE tool (32bit only!) that needs an Internet connection and only works if your SSD has an MBR partition style and at least one NTFS formatted partition on it. This makes updating the firmware on my Macbook (which has no Windows partition and uses a GUID partitioning scheme) a nightmare that requires a total wipe + installing a Windows system with Internet access.
Given that firmware updates for SSDs where at some point necessary to ensure data integrity (The Vertex had a bad firmware that produced lockups at some point, e.g.), this whole process just sucks.
8b/10b error correcting code.
I agree on random read performance, but random write speed is pretty much irrelevant. You can always cache writes to ram and write out the cache sequentially when convenient.
Thanks for that tip. I've been buying computer and printer memory from crucial but it was great to red the review on A&D and see how well their drives scored.
Seems unimpressinve when compared to the PCI-E cards that are out there. For instance check out this PCI-E SSD. Sure they're expensive, but they're much faster then you will ever get over SATA. To me, it makes almost no sense to be continuing down the SATA route and touting faster speeds when we already have a much faster way of transferring data.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
How to clear your disk cache: /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
echo 3 | sudo tee
By default, bonnie++ will test using file sizes that are twice your RAM, to make sure that disk caches get overrun.
You'll really want to use bonnie++ or iozone instead of hdparm if you're comparing HDs and SSDs, since SSDs really only shine with lots of small files. The hdparm results would be rather meaningless.
For my part, I'd rather drop $100 on a RAM upgrade than $200 on an SSD. Once you have all your files read into disk cache in RAM, HDs and SSDs perform pretty much identically. If you use the readahead utility to proactively preload all your small files into disk cache, HDs (esp. with RAID10 or RAID5) can perform just as well as SSDs.
http://trumblings.blogspot.com/2010/11/using-readahead-to-speed-up-disk.html
It does seem more than a little daft to not simply come up with a PCI-E-for-disks standard, and give us a nice little flexible PCI-E cable. However, since SATA disks are supposed to work on SAS I guess there's still some reason for SATA to exist...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Did...did you even look at the price before you started typing...????
The Intel X25 series was so much better than the alternatives when it came out, I was expecting more from its successor. The 510 doesn't even use an Intel-developed processor. It uses one from Marvel, which will eventually be used by other SSD manufacturers as well. And the 510 is already slower than drives based on Sandforce's newest chips, such as OCZ's Vertex 3. Lame, Intel.
...30MB/s is about the fastest I've seen from a laptop drive, and that was when it was completely new so every write was a sequential write.
Then you'll like this. This was just run off my Atom 270 netbook (HP Mini 110c) with a 500gb Samsung drive and Kubuntu 10.10 -
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$ sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda /dev/sda: ;-)
[sudo] password for wizard:
Timing cached reads: 1228 MB in 2.00 seconds = 613.74 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 312 MB in 3.01 seconds = 103.70 MB/sec
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
write test on the same netbook:
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/output.img bs=8k count=256k && sudo rm /tmp/output.img
262144+0 records in
262144+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 19.916 s, 108 MB/s
wizard@wizard-netbook:~$
we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
-- anais nin
And more importantly, your MP3's and movies do not require the random reads and writes which is an SSD's greatest strengths.
Unless, of course, you're producing music and movies. Nonlinear video editing, for example, requires a random read for each transition. And with some of the effects common in the Dadaist video remixes commonly called "YouTube Poop", there can be often several transitions in a second of video.
In addition, your games usually need random reads.
There is cheaper stuff out there, with less performance, although it still blows SATA out of the water.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It was on Fedora and the drivers are fine, It *could* be that it was a 4096 vs 512 situation but everything I saw said that both drives were 512...I will investigate this. As for the hardware, it's a non-consumer grade server....not something shoddy.
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Nope. It's a non-consumer grade server, not a laptop. The SCSI disks it boots from will transfer much more steadily and quickly than anything to do with the SATA by a factor of about 5-10.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Oh sure this gets 6 Gbit/ sec just like the Crucial C300 got 6 Gbit/sec.
Oh wait, neither got/get that. The drive is spec'd at 450 MB/sec reads (still nothing to sneeze at). 6 Gbit/sec is 750 MB/sec. The 6Gbit/sec is just the maximum speed of the interface.
I would expect a news for nerd site to not make this kind of mistake tbh. It only took a simple Newegg search to find the spec since the second page of the article indicated that this drive is indeed already for sale. Some might say this posting kind of seems like a slashvertisement in disguise.
Anyways, the C300 128 gig is 50 bucks cheaper than the 510 series 120 gig but the intel drive definitely wins on speed if it truely hits those benchmarks in typical use scenarios. That price might drop even further when the C400 (or whatever the next crucial drive is) comes out.
I get 110M/s write speed on magnetic SATA 2 drives :P
Infact, can't supply data fast enough for them to write X)
Theorethically capable of atleast 180M/s write speed, but can't test as i don't have source fast enough.
Now i'm looking to increase that to 240M/s write speed and about 400-440M/s read speed, with approximately 370-440 IOPS (I/O Operations per second). Yes, on magnetic drives.
How? Very easy: Striped RAID. And yes, that works on windows too.
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