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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."
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.
In my experience, the average RMA turnaround time for the four drives I've so far sent back to OCZ is not quite six weeks. It's not just that they die, it's that they die and the after-sale customer service is atrocious.
My single experience with getting an Intel SSD replaced was a three day turnaround from the day the defective unit shipped out.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
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
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.