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.

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

[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

[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:*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[XanC]

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

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.