Slashdot Mirror
Intel SSD 510 Series 6Gbps SATA Drives Tested
MojoKid writes "Intel
recently announced its 510 series Solid State Drive products. The new 510
series SSDs build upon Intel's successful X-25M series of drives by offering
native support for SATA 6Gbs interface speeds, with maximum reads in the 500MB/s
range and write speeds of approximately 315MB/s — huge improvements over the
previous generation. The numbers are in and the new Marvell-infused Intel SSD
offers impressive performance rivaling other 6Gbps SATA SSDs on the market
but not as fast as the recently announced
SandForce 2500-based SSDs like the OCZ Vertex 3."
If it starts at 500MB/s reads, how long does it stay that way before performance may begin to degrade (possibly, in some cases... maybe)?
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Now that that's out, I'm waiting for a price drop on the Intel X25-M 120GB version. It's currently listed as $229.99 on NewEgg.com. I'm going to guess that the real sale will happen once the new Mac OS gets released. At least, that's what I plan on doing.
Life is not for the lazy.
224MB formatted? I knew SSDs used some of the space for redundancy, but that's just ridiculous.
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I am quite happy that these SSD are becoming so fast. Hopefully soon personal desktops will come out with one of these as well as a disk HD. These SSDs serve a really neat niche of providing mid-range speed (compared to RAM) while still providing a large enough memory to store meaningful stuff. ZFS is really taking the right idea with smart usage of the speed and storage capacity of SSDs.
ZFS and SSDs
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. -- Isaac Asimov
Vertex 3 is based on SandForce SF-2200
They need to start including a conventional 2.5" hard drive in these comparisons. You can say they're in a different class, but these stories are always accompanied by people making direct cost/GB comparisons to hard drives, so clearly they are still competitors.
I haven't spent over $100 for a hard drive in years and I'm not going to start because it's an SSD.
Gone!
OCZ may be the speed king but they also seem like the failure king. Go read the reviews of OCZ SSD's on various sites, the one common thing seems to be that they all have a short lifespan.
Yes and no.
Deletions are more non-deterministic than with traditional hard drives.
When something is deleted, or even overwritten and scrubbed the old information is still there because the SSD's wear leveling firmware moves the write to a new physical block. This means you can't reliably erase or scrub anything on an SSD. Even if you fill the entire hard drive (DBAN) the SSD may be using the over-provisioning and not erase the old data.
However, after a block is deleted and a TRIM has been issued, the SSD firmware will take it on itself to quietly write all zeros to the block in the background when it has the opportunity (probably when the drive is idle for a fraction of a second). This is because to write on an SSD the device must erase then write the block. Doing this on demand would slow down writes, so the SSD erases TRIMed blocks when it can so on-demand writes can go faster.
So the answer to your question is both (1) You cannot reliably erase data on an SSD and (2) You cannot reliably recover deleted information on an SSD.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
All this new hi-speed data transfer technology should be just ripe for my next upgrade. 1 year ago I built a Quad Core system with all the standard SATA II stuff. I can see in about 5 years that all these super fast drives and Thunderbolt may be standard. But as of now I am satisfied with what I have.
I would never interfere with someone else's fetish, but what is the point of getting excited about SSD speeds? how many people who buy them have any sort of thought-out reason to get them, rather than alternatives? what's your workload that works if you can write at 315 MB/s, but fails if you're limited to a measly 250?
in general, the SSD market seems driven by fetish, and that's just fine. the whole auto market is fetish-driven. and apple, too ;)
what I wonder, though, is if there's someone out there designing, say, a complex website with load balancing, HA-failover, frontend/backend/storage specialization, etc who just needs a 315 MB/s storage device to win. it seems like current standard practice (inmemory nosql, fast private networks, etc) make pretty much any performance concern just a matter of turning the knob - usually just adding some nodes. but if that's the case, then there's little importance to 315 vs 250 MB/s.
When something is deleted, or even overwritten and scrubbed the old information is still there because the SSD's wear leveling firmware moves the write to a new physical block. This means you can't reliably erase or scrub anything on an SSD. Even if you fill the entire hard drive (DBAN) the SSD may be using the over-provisioning and not erase the old data.
Except that the ATA "sanitize" commands are supposed to do whatever is necessary to render the data permanently inaccessible (even by disassembling the device) before returning.
And just 18 days ago we had an article on a paper from UCSD where they tested nine ATA SSDs and of them:
- 4 worked correctly,
- 1 was encrypted so they couldn't check it with their methodology,
- 2 didn't work correctly, leaving some data accessible,
- 1 LIED, saying it succeeded but doing nothing to erase the data, and
- 1 didn't implement the command.
I suspect the grandparent posting was asking which category this drive will occupy.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You can blank an Intel drive quite easily. They support the ATA secure erase instruction and their SSD toolbox provides a simple way to issue it.
Only problem is it only works on a whole-drive level, not individual files.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
As always, I find AnandTech's coverage to have a few nuggets of information that most other publications don't. It's well worth a read, particularly for those curious about TRIM performance and degradation over time. There's also a nice page on average reliability around different SSD manufacturers.
Anand concludes by saying that the 510 is one of the fastest drives around today, but only worthwhile on a 6Gbps interface. He points out that they've swapped excellent random performance in the older X-25 for excellent sequential performance in the 510. The Vertex 3 still comes out on top, but the 510 should be more reliable. If OCZ can make their new drives more reliable, Intel will have an uphill battle to fight.
Then there's also the other SSDs, since we've only heard from OCZ and Intel thus far.
That's the cost of being an early adopter. You should be proud of that, man! How many of *them* never heard of Apple Newton - even though it had just a little too slow processor to handle it's software power? Raise your hand, if you know what it feels to have Gravis Ultrasound just to have it killed with Windows 95, or texting and talking with Matrix Neo's Nokia (old 7110) phone - just to realise that even tho the call answering effect is awesome, the phone wears and starts answering - and rejecting - your phones while in your pocket.
Man, I for one love to be ahead of the curve. And even if it means you got to pay the price for some time... still, it's worth it.
Plain old sigh.