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Intel Plans 'Overclocking' Capability On SSDs
Lucas123 writes "Anticipating it will make a 'big splash,' Intel is planning to release an product late this year or very early next that will allow users to 'overclock' solid-state drives. The overclocking capability is expected to allow users to tweak the percentage of an SSD's capacity that's used for data compression. At its Intel Developers Forum next month in San Francisco, Intel has scheduled an information session on overclocking SSDs. The IDF session is aimed at system manufacturers and developers as well as do-it-yourself enthusiasts, such as gamers. 'We've debated how people would use it. I think the cool factor is somewhat high on this, but we don't see it changing the macro-level environment. But, as far as being a trendsetter, it has potential,' said Intel spokesman Alan Frost. Michael Yang, a principal analyst with IHS Research, said the product Intel plans to release could be the next evolution of SandForce controller, 'user definable and [with the] ability to allocate specified size on the SSD. Interesting, but we will have to see how much performance and capacity [it has] over existing solutions,' Yang said in an email reply to Computerworld."
Time to make some watercooling blocks and special fans and make money from those with too much.
So, what Intel are saying, is that they are going to take a SSD controller with unstable, buggy firmware - and then add a feature that allows users to modify the internal constants the firmware uses to do it's job. This can only end very badly, unless Intel and Sandforce do some serious testing to find and fix the data corruption issues, the problems with the drive ignoring the host, and the problems where the drive gets stuck in busy.
(all problems detailed in this post have been experienced with an Intel branded, Sandforce controller-ed drive)
Over-provisioning already exists on a ton of different SSDs like Samsung and OCZ. Intel didn't invent anything new and the controller's MHz isn't going anywhere, nor would that be a good idea anyway. One flaw in the data and it's goodbye boot drive data integrity. What a useless "catching up" announcement.
would I want to use compression at all, if my goal is speed? If maximizing total capacity is not the concern, I would use none of the drive for compression. I think the point to be taken from this is that Intel is recognizing that storage capacities for SSDs are reaching the point where compression is no longer necessary to make the technology a viable alternative to mechanical drives, and we will now begin seeing the true speed potential of the technology.
Wow. You really like the taste of the koolaid huh. Intel has always been against overclocking because it eats into their margin. They had thermal protection so overheating is not a problem. Overvoltage might fry your cpu, but only after a very long time or a very high voltage - both of which can be controlled, so it's not like you'd pump 5V through a 1.35V part.
And Intel traditionally bins its parts - you might want to check that out.
Time for Seagate to make some real hard drives that spin at 20000 RPM
I hear the 20000 RPM drives cut roast beef extra thin.
It's the ancient tradeoff of CPU vs. IO. When you have more of one than you need, burn it to improve the other.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
"Overclocking" is technically a misnomer. It's a sort of tweaking, but it's a bit more than that; we could call it ... twerking!
"...gimmick?"
You are welcome on my lawn.
They're using "overclocking" here as a metaphor, but people seem to take it literally. Overclocking the drive would involve raising voltage and increasing clock speeds. That's probably possible. But what they're talking about appears to be to give the user the ability to influence the amount of overprovisioning on the drive. For an SSD, the physical capacity is larger than the logical capacity. This is important in order to decrease the amount of sector migration needed when looking for a block to erase. From zero, adding overprovisioning will substantially increase write performance, but at a diminishing rate as you add more extra space.
As for compression, it does two things. It allows more sectors to be consolidated into the same page, amplifying the very limited flash write bandwidth. And it effectively increases the amount of overprovisioning. These two mean that more compressible data will have substantially higher write performance and somewhat higher read performance. (Although reads are already fast enough, on many drives, to max out the SATA bandwidth.)
Anyhow, giving the user the ability to tweak overprovisioning seems pretty worthless to me. At best, some users will be able to increase the logical capacity, at the expense of having lousy write performance. Maybe this would help for drives where you store large amounts of media that you write once and read a lot. But how much more capacity could you get? 25%? Another knob might be compression "effort", which trades off compute time against SSD bandwidth. There's going to be a balancing point between the two, and that probably should be dynamic in the controller, not tweaked by users who don't know the internal architecture of the drive. Some writes will take longer than others due to wear leveling, migration, and garbage collection, giving the drive controller more or less free time to spend on compressing data.
After you deal with HD & SSD failures, you are only concerned with reliability.
It is not an overclock but the ability to adjust the "spare area". This is the percentage of flash on the drive that is not exposed to the user and is used for garbage collection, write acceleration (by having pre-erased blocks), reduction of write amplification, etc. You can emulate more spare area on drives already if you take SSD and format it to less that it's full capacity.
This is the SSD equivalent to short stroking a hard drive.
It's worth noting that the higher performance and enterprise level drives already have much more spare area but that results in a tradeoff of capacity for performance. They are just going to let you set this slider between consumer level (maximum capacity per $$$) and performance level (higher performance but less capcity).
Mod AC up! How does one even 'clock' an SSD, much less 'overclock'? SSDs are made up of NAND flash, which do NOT include a clock input - they operate in asynchronous operation. So how does that even start to make sense?
And are we talking just read speeds here? They are typically 70ns for single word mode, and somewhat less - say 50ns for page mode. That would translate to 20MHz. Not your 2 or 3GHz that one thinks of, particularly w/ CPUs and DDR3 RAM