Intel Replaces Consumer SSD Line, Nixes SLC-SSD

Lucas123 writes "Intel today launched a line of consumer solid state drives that replaces the industry's best selling X25-M line. The new 320 series SSD doubles the top capacity over the X25-M drives to 600GB, doubles sequential write speeds, and drops the price as much as 30% or $100 on some models. Intel also revealed its consumer SSDs have been outselling its enterprise-class SSDs in data centers, so it plans to drop its series of single-level cell NAND flash SSDs and create a new series of SSDs based on multi-level cell NAND for servers and storage arrays. Unlike its last SSD launch, which saw Intel use Marvell's controller, the company said it stuck with its own processing technology with this series."

Comments

Generations

[DarkXale]

The 320 series isn't quite as impressive over the X25-M G2 series as I had originally hoped, so will likely be quite some time before I bother replacing the current one (and move that into the laptop instead).
Still, an update has been due for a long time now the X25-M G2 is ancient in SSD terms. Just hope the new controller is as reliable as the Intel one found in the old drives.

Re:Generations

[Lucas123]

The Marvell controller is only being used in the higher-end 510 series SSD that was announced last month. That SSD is being aimed at gamers, workstations and such. This is being marketed to laptop and desktop users, even though it's winding up in data centers.

Don't like this

[XanC]

MLC the only option on a server? For high-transaction databases, I don't see how it will work.

Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[sandytaru]

I'm not going to run out and replace my $100 2TB external backup with one of these any time soon. However, I've been tempted to snag a small 40 gig model and use that as my OS drive, and use my existing internal 1TB HDD for the actual data. I think the article is right, in that the price per gig needs to hit $1 before you start seeing acceptance for mass storage solutions from consumers. 95% of users can't tell the difference between a 5600 RPM HDD and a 10,000 RPM one, so they won't care about SSD speeds that much either.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[CastrTroy]

Maybe the reason users can't tell the difference between 5600 (5400??) RPM and 10,000 RPM is because for the most part what is slowing things down is the seek latency. In both those drives, they seek latency is going to be 12 ms and 7 ms respectively. Which you're right, the user probably won't notice. But a solid state drive will give you a seek time of about 0.1 ms which will make a huge difference in many situations. Most users will probably notice a change like this because seek time is probably what is slowing down the computer most of the time.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[hairyfeet]

Well and I'd argue that on modern Windows the extra expense really isn't worth it for a lot of regular users. RAM is cheap and Windows 7 Superfetch will quickly learn what programs you launch and when, and lets face it no SSD beats RAM.

I maxed my board out at 8GB and with Superfetch frankly everything I normally use launches as fast as I click it since with my predictable behavior Windows 7 simply loads it into RAM at the appropriate time. Considering maxing out most boards costs less than $100 and hybrid sleep makes shut downs kinda pointless unless you have a program that requires serious I/O for the average user there simply isn't a point in going SSD, not when 2TB drives can be had for $80.

Too bad SSDs didn't come out 10 years ago as it would have been most welcome when everyone was stuck on IDE with tiny caches and lousy memory management, for the "Average Joe" with plenty of RAM, big caches on the HDDs, and Superfetch preloading programs into RAM based on time and usage patterns? Kinda pointless IMHO especially at the prices per GB.

The only ones I've sold have been to my ePeen "Must have the highest benchmarks!" gamer customers and playing with their PCs other than bootup I really couldn't feel a difference. That is why I've been telling my regular customers and those wanting new builds to max out on RAM first and then if they still have money to blow after getting the rest of their wish list get an SSD for an OS drive, because frankly if their choice is RAM or SSD I'd always advise the most RAM as it'll get more use.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[dc29A]

I'm not going to run out and replace my $100 2TB external backup with one of these any time soon.

I am not going to run out and replace my minivan that I use to ferry my four kids and wife with a two seater sports car any time soon!

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[fast turtle]

I've been preaching the max ram option to people who are planning on new systems since 2003 when I was able to see the difference it made using Gentoo Linux. The testing method was a bit simplistic but as it involved bootstrapping the system, the difference in time required with 512 compared to 1GB was impressive and convinced me at that time to install the most memory I could afford.

What I find funny now is people are spending their money on High Performance Gaming RAM when actual benchmarks show no improvement in performance for the same amount of memory. Instead you get more bang for buck by going with the max memory your system can use and for gaming, that helps improve things much faster then any other upgrade with the exception of a High End Video card.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Rockoon]

The $/GB metric is often irrelevant.

Sure, I can get 3TB for $100, but for $170 I can get a very high performance SSD that is large enough (90GB) for my needs.

Why do all my computers need terabytes of storage? Thats right.. they don't. I only need large storage on shared network media. My computers need high performance storage, not stupid amounts of extra GB's.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[CohibaVancouver]

The $/GB metric is often irrelevant.

Bingo.

I know of a large company that is starting the switchover. They calculated that removing the loss in productivity caused by long OS startups more than easily pays for the cost of switching to SSDs. The math that you might use on your home computer doesn't always apply in the business world.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[PRMan]

I already have 8GB on my home server and that makes very little difference from 4GB since it sits idle at ~4GB most of the time. But the SSD made a world of difference. A 2-3 minute boot became 25 seconds. A 1+ minute shutdown became about 5 seconds. I don't worry about reboots anymore, because it's around 30 seconds total (instead of 5 minutes)! Game cutscenes are almost instantly skippable (within 2-3 seconds), if they allow it. EVERY program loads instantly. Installs take mere seconds (even OpenOffice or Office 2007).

BTW, my RAM maxes out at 24 GB on this board, but if you told me the 24GB would help more than the 64GB SSD (about $90), you would be doing me a horrific disservice.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have two regular HD's in RAID 0, now I have two SSD's in RAID 0. There is simply no comparison. SSD's absolutely blow away traditional Hard Drives, it's not about the Mb/sec... it's about the I/O's per second, and in this sense SSD's are about 70-100 times faster than traditional disks. Photoshop, Office, Firefox, everything opens instantly. I can even open 5 programs at once and they still all open instantly. This can all be done with 4GB of ram too, no need to buy more memory to make up for having a slow disk array anymore. Even with 2GB of ram it's still insanely fast.

Oh and a virus scan takes about 90 seconds, and I don't even notice it running, everything still opens instantly even with it running in the background... try that with your Raptor Raid 0 array.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Lord Ender]

Right. Focusing on read and write speed is misleading. The reason for this is that the perceived speed of SSDs comes from seek times, not R/W speed.

Think of it like this: ever play a game on a server in Korea with a one-second ping? Even if your connection is 100Mb/s, that feels horrible. This is analogous to a mechanical hard drive. Compare it to the LAN game where the server is 10ms away - even on a 10Mb/s pipe it's far better. That's what an SSD feels like.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Ndkchk]

SSDs affect other things besides just speed. I put one in my netbook and battery life went from six hours to eight - and it boots in fifteen seconds and starts programs almost instantly. The difference in power consumption matters less in a bigger laptop, but it would still help. I also don't see why you're talking about an SSD and a 2TB drive as a binary choice. The "average user" doesn't need 2TB; they already have enough space with the ~500GB that came with their Dell. They could get an SSD, keep the hard drive they already have, get someone to move the Windows install, and have the best of both worlds.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Kevin Stevens]

Considering flash was about $7.50/gb in 2007, $3.80 in 2009, and is now down to about $1.71/gb, all the while capacities are increasing, I think pricing will be "competitive" in a year or two. Also we are just beginning the release cycle of the next generation- OCZ and crucial are set to release their products this month, so price/$GB could drop further in the very immediate future. Speeds are still increasing by leaps and bounds with each generation- the new vertex 3's, in real actual use, have seen sustained transfer rates over 400 MegaBYTES per second.

Adding an SSD is the best upgrade you can do to increase performance. If you look at the videos on you tube, they show that loading even the largest, slowest apps like Photoshop, CAD, WoW, etc are more than 2x as fast as a hard disk- most app loads are instantaneou-, and thus halve boot times. SSD's use a fraction of the energy, which means cooler laptops with longer battery lives, and quieter desktops that also require less cooling. You are right that SSD's aren't suitable for mass storage, I think for at least 5 years we will see hybrid setups, and then gradually we will see a move towards SSD only systems.

There is real value in adding an SSD today though, IMHO.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[gad_zuki!]

Caching solutions are always poor. No system is smart enough to cache everything and there's a cost to caching - misses, reading the first time, etc that produce lag and the characteristic disk churn of mechanical drives.

I find in everyday usage, most users are disk bound. CPU and RAM are just sitting around waiting for the disk. I've only put in 3 SSDs and the difference is night and day. The low seek times and transfer speeds make the computer feel completely different. Once Joe Average gets to see one of these in person, he'll be demanding one. Unfortunately, computer marketing is built around CPU speed, which is useless past a certain point for most users eg paying $150 for a .1 ghz uptick.

Ironically, gamers probably dont get as large of a boost as a general user. Your game is doing big reads and occasional little writes. You don't get all the benefits from SSDs in that scenario.

Toss in the power savings and you'll find that SSDs are ready for the mainstream. Not to mention the average user uses something like 30 or 40gigs of the drive, most of which is the OS and binaries and only has couple of gigs of personal files. Power users will just tack on 1TB drives and be on their way.

  Once 120gb drives hit $100, mech hard drives in laptops are dead. I'm already seeing people complimenting the Macbook Air on how fast it, when its a pretty meager CPU, but they don't know that, they just see it runs quick because of the SSD.

*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[Chas]

Seriously. Any sort of enterprise-level should be swearing off these things as a storage medium then. Well, maybe for a boot drive. But anything with massive amount of writes should be kept as far away from an MLC drive as possible.

It's a 3GBps part

[ameline]

It is a bit behind the times with no Sata 3 (6 GBps) support.

Re:*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[DigiShaman]

Why? If the MLC cells are both fast and reliable, why does that matter? If I understand this correctly, MLCs would be the equivalent of clusters on an HDD. If any bit of that data within that cluster needs to be changed, its entire contents will be all read, and re-written back to another cluster. The same process occurs on an MLC.

Re:*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[XanC]

Because SLCs survive for two orders of magnitude more writes than MLCs.

Re:*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[fnj]

More to the point, it's the difference in life between one month and 8 years.

Re:SSD vs HD

[baka_toroi]

Yes, sir.

2014 will be that year.

Re:SSD vs HD

[Anonymous Coward]

It took them 3 years or so to go down 30% in price, maybe. It'll probably take them 2 more years to drop another 30%, and after that 1 more year to drop another 30%. At which point they'll most likely hit a wall and they'll only drop variably 30% every year, year after year.

I speculate 5 - 10 years to beat the price / performance of conventional hard drives. That's the point at which your average consumer does not find any value at all in owning a conventional hard drive. Already, many enthusiasts are willing to make their main HDD a SSD even at current prices, there's demand here and it's going to drive up research and drive down prices as people thirst for more storage space at a lower price point with a higher speed. Many of those same enthusiasts still see value in have 2nd and 3rd conventional hard drives for cheaper and larger secondary storage. At some point their slow speeds combined with low price are going to meet or near SSD price points and consumers are simply going to purchase SSD all around.

The SSD speed is of a different magnitude

[aussersterne]

There's no comparison between the 5,600-10,000 RPM gap and the HDD-SSD gap.

I took the plunge last year and installed X-25M drives in my desktop and laptop as OS drives, with secondary drives for user data. The difference is the single greatest performance jump I've ever experienced in 30 years of upgrading, going even back to the days of replacing clock generators on mainboards to overclock 8-bit CPUs by 50 percent.

There is literally a several-orders-of-magnitude difference in the overall speed of the system. If you haven't experienced it, a description of the difference doesn't sound credible, but a multi-drive RAID-0 array of 10k drives doesn't come close to a single SSD in terms of throughput.

I can't go back to non-SSD OS installs now. Systems without an SSD literally seem to crawl, as if stuck in a time warp of some kind. Non-SSD systems seem, frankly, absurdly slow.

Re:*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[Frnknstn]

No. Two orders of magnitude is 100x. Good SLC vs good MLC is 10x, only a single order of magnitute longer lasting.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2614/4

What you forget is MLC is about 2x cheaper than SLC, so you can get 2x the space for the same price. With wear leveling, extra space is extra lifespan, so MLC dies 5x faster than SLC.

What does that mean for you? I put my money (job) where my mouth is. Our reasonably high traffic OLTP database server uses Intel SSDs as filesystem-level write cache. We get an average write level of 10MB/sec. The minimum expected lifespan of the drive is 2 petabytes. That means we likely have SIX YEARS before the cells start to become unwritable. At that point, no data will be lost: the drive will report the write failures to the OS and store to cells that haven't become unwritable yet, and you will be able to continue operating for the next few months while you get a replacement drive.

Re:*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[georgewilliamherbert]

Doubling lifespan that way requires that you only use half the disk capacity.

I have burned out a Major Name Brand SLC SSD with a high traffic OLTP DB in eight months. I have heard the same from Large Internet Companies which tested these for internal use. There are ongoing independent reliability expert studies in FAST, HOTDEP, other conferences which are uniformly highly skeptical of vendors' claims on SSD lifetime.

If you have not actually tested the drive out to six years service, run an accellerated pilot test unit out ahead of your main prod usage, to give you the canary warning.