Intel Launches Flurry of 3D NAND-Based SSDs For Consumer and Enterprise Markets (hothardware.com)

MojoKid writes: Intel launched a handful of new SSD products today that cover a broad spectrum of applications and employ 3D NAND technology. The SSD 600p Series is offered in four capacities ranging from 128GB, to 256GB, 512GB and 1TB. The drivers are targeted at consumer desktops and notebooks and are available in the M.2 form-factor. The entry-level 128GB model offers sequential reads and writes of up to 770 MB/sec and 450 MB/sec respectively. At higher densities, the multi-channel 1TB model offers sequential reads and writes that jump to 1,800 MB/sec and 560 MB/sec respectively. The 128GB SSD 600p weighs in at $69, while the 1TB model is priced at $359, or about .36 cents per GiB. For the data center, Intel has also introduced the DC P3520 and DC S3520 Series SSDs in 2.5-inch and PCIe half-height card form-factors. Available in 450GB to 2TB capacities, the range-topping 2TB model offers random reads/writes of 1,700 MB/sec and 1,350 MB/sec respectively. Finally, Intel launched the SSD E 6000p (PCIe M.2) and SSD E 5420s Series (SATA). The former supports Core vPro processors and is targeted at point-of-sale systems and digital signage. The latter is aimed at helping customers ease the transition from HDDs to SSDs in IoT applications.

Comments

Math is hard

[Anonymous Coward]

the 1TB model is priced at $359, or about .36 cents per GiB

Really? REALLY?

Re:Math is hard

[Anonymous Coward]

It'd be roughly $0.39, anyway. If you want to be clever and use GiB instead of GB, use it correctly.

Re:Math is hard

[jbengt]

Drives have always been marketed in GB and TB.

No, they used to be marketed as MB, and even lower. And that was when a MB was typically understood to be 1024 KBs and a KB was known to be 1024 bytes.

Re:Math is hard

[unixisc]

Semiconductor memory, be it RAM or Flash, is bit addressable and will always be in powers of 2. 10^12 is not a power of 2. 2^40 is. In the case of NAND flash, ALE is asserted and the IO lines are cycled 5 times to get the address. NAND flash is what is used to make SSDs.

Different from magnetic media, where you have a disc divided into sectors, and the number is usually a function of Pascal's triangle, due to the way the bytes would be packed and distributed

Speed or density?

[jez9999]

So is the main advantage of 3d NAND technology going to be access speed? I thought it was going to be able to enormously increase capacity, but with the drives coming in between 128GB and 1TB (similar sizes to existing drives), maybe I got the wrong idea.

Re:Speed or density?

[Anonymous Coward]

Planar (2D) NAND is getting smaller and smaller in order to accommodate increases in required density per module. This leads to bigger SSDs, but has a downside - smaller cells are more fragile, which decreases durability (we're down to thousands of erase cycles nowadays), and it's harder to measure multiple levels of voltages reliably.

The main advantage of 3D NAND is the ability to have big cells while still having steady increases of density per module. Durability is also back to "old levels". That's why 3D NAND SSDs can enjoy 5-10 year warranty even in the consumer space.

This leads to a 4TB SSD being quite small even for a 2.5" (http://images.anandtech.com/doci/10481/CRW_3479B.jpg)

I'm getting old.

[dr.Flake]

What amazes me most, but is probably because i'm getting old is:

looking at the announcement, it seems like the SATA drive is just an obligatory part of the line-up. Its all M.2 and PCIe.

Sure, SATA is getting old quickly and starts to become the bottleneck, but the way this is going, motherboards will soon have some SATA port somewhere for the occasional DVD / old spinning drive, and M.2 for the rest. Did i just recently buy my last SATA drives to fill up my NAS? I'm not planning on buying more for the next couple of years.

Man, i remember buying my first ATA drive. And i was late to the party, it already was a stunning 20MB (imagine how many WP files were needed to fill that sucker up to the rim). And man, that thing was fast as lightning! ;-)

Re:I'm getting old.

[thegarbz]

looking at the announcement, it seems like the SATA drive is just an obligatory part of the line-up. Its all M.2 and PCIe.

For SSDs is this really so surprising? A common configuration at the moment is SSD for the primary drive, spinning rust for the secondary large storage. With many motherboards shipping with M.2 slots and all of them with PCIe, it would make perfect sense to not have to run cables to your primary part of your system, and only for the secondary high density storage.

This is common in my systems at home. They all have M.2 drives in them. My desktop also has a 2TB spinning rust, and my NAS has one M.2 drive and then 6 spinning rust drives.

When I first saw an SSD on a PCIe card I straight away thought, the future is here!

Re:I'm getting old.

[sexconker]

SATA Express was dead before it arrived. M.2 killed it. I still haven't seen a single SATA Express device, though motherboards do have the ports for them.
I hope M.2 goes the fuck away. It's a laptop fucking spec and those tiny little shits overheat and throttle because of it. I hope the U.2 shit takes over so we can get high performance 2.5" SSDs with proper housings. (Of course, I'd still prefer they give us 3.5" SSDs but that battle has been lost.)

Re:Jesus, editors

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, no. The linked article doesn't include the word *cents*, hence the .36 refers back to the full price unit of $, and is therefore correct. The summary is wrong.

How does this compare to 3d-xpoint stuff?

[WolphFang]

How does this compare to 3d-xpoint stuff?

Re:How does this compare to 3d-xpoint stuff?

[swb]

Yeah, where IS 3D-Xpoint?

A push into the MLC market with a miracle storage technology "just around the corner" seems an odd initiative. If 3D-Xpoint is as good as they say, I would think they would want to focus on stealing the market with a unique and superior product rather than trying for slivers of an existing market.

Of course the cynic in me assumes that 3D-Xpoint is nowhere near ready and if it is, Intel just want to milk the existing NAND technology for maximum profit and dribble out the new stuff at maximum price points for both their own benefit and the benefit of OEM customers who want to keep milking stratospheric "enterprise" pricing on even MLC flash devices.

Pedantry fail

[Anonymous Coward]

the 1TB model is priced at $359, or about .36 cents per GiB

Look, I've got nothing against being pedantic with "GiB" = 2^30 bytes, and I can divide by 1000 on my own, but if you're going there at least get it right.

1TB is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and is only 931.323 GiB, so the cost per GiB is 39 cents to 2 significant digits. Note that's nowhere near .36 cents, which is less than half a cent. I presume OP meant "$0.36" or "36 cents".

The difference isn't that big

[Solandri]

It's important to understand that while we benchmark storage in MB/s, those units are actually the inverse of how we perceive their speed - wait time. Wait time would be sec/GB. To see what the consequences of this are, imagine loading up a game involves reading 1 GB of data, and for simplicity imagine you can read that 1 GB at max speed.

33 MB/s = 30 sec - old IDE HDD
66 MB/s = 15 sec - newer IDE HDD
125 MB/s = 8 sec - SATA HDD
250 MB/s = 4 sec - SATA2 SSD
500 MB/s = 2 sec - SATA3 SSD
1000 MB/s = 1 sec - early PCIe SSDs
2000 MB/s = 0.5 sec - newer PCIe SSDs

Notice how every time MB/s doubles, wait time is only cut in half. This means perceive speed increases are the inverse of MB/s, and thus not linear in terms of MB/s. The difference between SATA and SATA3 (125 MB/s and 500 MB/s) is "only" 375 MB/s. While the difference between SATA3 and newer PCIe drives is a whopping 1500 MB/s. But that doesn't mean that upgrading from SATA3 to a newer PCIe SSD will feel 4x faster than upgrading from a HDD to a SATA3 SSD felt.

The reduction in wait time going from the SATA HDD to a SATA3 SSD was 8 sec vs 2 sec - a 6 sec reduction. But the reduction in wait time going from SATA3 to newer PCIe is only 2 sec vs 0.5 sec - a 1.5 sec reduction. So upgrading from a SATA3 SSD to a newer PCIe SSD will only give you 1/4 the perceived speed increase you got when you upgraded from a HDD to a SSD. Not 4x. Compared to a SATA HDD, a SATA3 SSD gives you 80% the wait time reduction of the newest PCIe SSDs (6 sec vs 7.5 sec).

In other words, for the typical amounts of data we need to read off of storage, SATA3 SSDs have already given us most of the speed benefit we can expect by making our storage media faster. (The same problem plagues cars and using MPG to measure fuel efficiency. MPG is actually the inverse of fuel efficiency. It's the metric you want to use if you have a fixed amount of fuel and need to know how far you can travel, like if you're in a boat. The vast majority of people's driving is the other way around - they need to travel a fixed distance, and want to do it using as little fuel as possible - which is GPM. So the biggest fuel savings actually comes from making fuel hogs like tractor trailers, buses, and SUVs more efficient, not from econoboxes like the Prius. Despite how big 50 MPG sounds, going from 25 MPG to 50 MPG actually only represents half the fuel saved of going from 12.5 MPG to 25 MPG.. The rest of the world measures fuel efficiency in liters per 100 km for this reason - equivalent to GPM.)

Re: Question

[Coren22]

I was only aware of the Scientology post, what other posts were deleted?

Also, I believe that the AC was mischaracterizing a -1 mod as deleting the post and censorship, which is a very common complaint, that is also entirely wrong.

Re: Question

[Coren22]

Trump only appears racist because the media likes to portray him that way. Me not being able to find out WTF you are talking about with a jewish accountant does not make me a bad Googler however, as apparently it isn't being widely reported on.

If you really think that Trump is a racist for wanting to build a wall, I have news for you, Hillary wants one too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re: Question

[Coren22]

I wasn't aware of those issues, thank you for the heads up.

The Brianna Wu interview had me rolling. She is a bigger troll than any of the Slashdot trolls. Every question was a complete suck up question to get her to talk about how awesome she is. It was awful, the ask side challenged her to actually answer for all the terrible things she has done, but not a single one of those questions apparently even made it to her inbox.

https://interviews.slashdot.or...
https://interviews.slashdot.or...

It sure made my faith in the interview posts disappear, but I never would have expected the amount of post deleting you bring up. Some of those don't even make sense. If people don't like Beta, they don't like it. Deleting the posts won't suddenly make more people like the crappy interface.