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Intel releases lightning quick solid-state drives
Intel X25-M flash drive delivers massive read performance and low latency, but at a price
Just as promised at the San Francisco installment of the IDF geek fest, Intel has unleashed its hotly anticipated solid state drives (SSDs). If our initial impressions are anything to go by, they're seriously quick.
The X25-M is
aimed at desktop PCs and laptops. It's a NAND flash drive in
2.5-inch trim with standard S-ATA power and data interfaces. At launch it's
available in 80GB and 160GB capacities. Intel will also offer the 1.8-inch
X18-M.
Intel's SSDs, of
course, are not the first mainstream examples to hit the market. A number of
outfits already offer vaguely
affordable SSDs for desktop and laptop PCs, such as Samsung, wth its latest 32GB drive. However, those drives have so far
delivered somewhat underwhelming performance, particularly in terms of write
speeds. But Intel reckons its SSDs are a bit different.
Intel has kitted the X25-M out with its own compute-quality NAND flash memory as well as a
custom designed controller and firmware. The result is said to be superior
performance to existing flash-based SSDs.
But is it true? The specs certainly look promising. The X25-M's 250MB/s sustained read
rating is well above anything competing SSDs can manage. It's in a
completely different ballpark to the read performance of any conventional hard
disk based on spinning magnetic platters. Even Western Digital's mighty
VelociRaptor only pumps out read speeds of around 100MB/s.
As for write
speeds, the X25-M is rated at a slightly less spectacular 75MB/s. That's
comparable to the best competing SSDs and on a par with all but the quickest
conventional hard disks. The 10,000rpm Velociraptor clocks
up write speeds in the 100MB/s region.
Like all SSDs,
the X25-M also delivers much better latencies than rotating drives. The net
result of which is noticeably snappier all round PC performance. It's enough to
make us wonder which is more important to reducing lag in day-to-day computing: a powerful quad-core CPU or this nippy little SSD?
And if the X25-M
isn't quick enough for you, Intel will shortly be serving up the even faster
X25-X. Thanks to the use of faster single-level cell memory, it has twice the
write speed of the X25-M and should be the undisputed king of hard drive
performance.
There is,
however, a catch. UK prices have yet to be set in stone. But given the bulk US
sticker of $595 for the 80GB model, don't expect much change out of £400 once
the Chancellor has had his cut. It's shipping to customers in the US at the moment, but with no firm word on UK availability, it will be a few weeks before it will be available here.
That's an awful
lot of money for an 80GB drive. But then the X25-M does look awfully quick.
Reddit | Technorati
I wonder if this issue will be fixed in Windows 7? ........................................... See below for a Wikipedia quote: ........................................... The final problem is that the NTFS file system isn't well suited for these flash disks. Benchmarks are needed regarding the performance difference on Windows between MLC and SLC disks, but the fact remains that MLC and SLC disks both perform exceedingly well in Linux using a journaled filesystem like ext3, attaining write speeds far above manufacturer benchmarks, as high as 126MB/s with sequential writes.
Comment by l3v1ck at 3:38am 15th September 2008
Interesting comment tele2002, that is a good price but it only comes with a 2 year warranty which worries me as they have a much shorter lifespan. How hot do they SSDs get and would not being able to defrag a HDD over many months lower the high read speeds? If they answer these questions positively in the upcoming CustomPC review, then with higher capacity of 300-500Gb & lower prices next year, I'll have to get a couple ordered. Maybe next year there will be a better HDD technology without any of the negatives raised here.
Comment by champmanfan2 at 2:41pm 13th September 2008
Well looking on Overclockers today they have a £207 60gig SSD drive that quotes 'Core Series SSD V2 deliver enhanced speeds of up to 170MB/s read and 98MB/s write speeds' thats pretty close to what the Intel drives are meant to be, so I hope this one is in the test roundup as a comparative model.
Comment by tele2002 at 1:19pm 12th September 2008
Well looking on Overclockers today they have a £207 60gig SSD drive that quotes 'Core Series SSD V2 deliver enhanced speeds of up to 170MB/s read and 98MB/s write speeds' thats pretty close to what the Intel drives are meant to be, so I hope this one is in the test roundup as a comparative model.
Comment by tele2002 at 1:19pm 12th September 2008
will have to take up the slack on the price of these things. they are the future im sure, but most wont acquire them until they are a lot cheaper. no doubt in a couple years they will be cheaper, bigger and therefore a lot better value for money, and no doubt even faster. witness the SSD revolution
Comment by vulcanproject at 8:50pm 9th September 2008
Startup and running games on a windows operating system will feel like a linux with one of them badboys. All i can say is welldone intel. Give it 2 years and they'll be half that, much worth the investment.
Comment by Lightning_Pete at 12:44pm 9th September 2008
Stupid link won't fit on one post here. Here it is again on two lines, use them both in the address bar. http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/ intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4
Comment by l3v1ck at 1:37am 9th September 2008
Strangely it sounds like a three year guarantee. The part of the Anandtech article relating to how long they will last is at: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=4
Comment by l3v1ck at 1:33am 9th September 2008
(this comment box is upside down new posts are at the top not the botem, it needs an edit button so i can change the content in it)
Comment by leexgx at 1:19am 9th September 2008
defrag should be off and never be ran on an ssd drive but on the intel one with 100gb an day that should not be an problem once every month as that not be much realy full review below (unless its not alowed to be posted) you realy need to read the review very good it is the drive has 6gb of bad sector reloaction so when the disk starts to fail it start useing them as well as intel will be provideing an S.M.A.R.T tool so you know when its going to fail unlike spinning disks its pot luck read all of it shocking how bad the JMicron JMF602 that ALL MLC based SSD use apart from intel (so do not bash OCZ as all MLC based SSD have the same problem) one problem tho is he did not test it on nvidia or AMD hardware as past problems with poor performace with SSD + intel chipsets (the Mac laptop he used allso had an intel chipset) http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3403
Comment by leexgx at 1:08am 9th September 2008
Does that mean Intel are bundling 5 year guarantees with the drives? That would be pretty awesome!
Comment by CSQuake at 11:39pm 8th September 2008
According to Anandtech Intel will guarantee 100Gb of written data per day for five years. Their labs text also showed major issues with some other brand SSD's.
Comment by l3v1ck at 11:05pm 8th September 2008
Im sure it was Custom PC, in a recent SSD article, did some calculations with regards to how many times you can write to ssd's, it turned out that for an average user the number of writes would last a good number of years, it equated to the same average lifespan of a regular HDD. Sorry im so vague, search for the article and see for yourselves, i dont think the number of writes is an issue at all.
Comment by russell at 8:57pm 8th September 2008
reviews, they are in harware forum and they are pretty detailed. Post you thoughts there...
Comment by marekkolesar at 8:25pm 8th September 2008
with what people have said. Defragging an SSD doesn't yeild any noticeable performace gain, so there's no point putting the extra wear and tear into it. As for the drive wearing out, I don't think that's really true unless the drive uses cheap components. As SSDs are very expensive and companies are trying to lower the cost to average Joe consumer levels, this is probably where the problems have come from with other drives. I'd like to think Intel wouldn't do this as much, especially if they're trying to establish themselves as a market leader in this sector, but who knows. A quick Froogle search shows X25-M's going for around $660, so £400 isn't far off but it may be higher initially when they hit our shores. Like Marek said, it'll probably be at least 12 months before they get anywhere near reasonably priced.
Comment by TWeaKoR at 7:44pm 8th September 2008
and you should disable you page file. That is what OCZ recommends to people on newegg.com in the review section for products. I think 8gb of ram is must when using these so you can disable page file without slowing down the system. I love the idea of SSD but £400 is too much, I will need to wait as I won't pay more than £200 for 80gb. I guess in next 12 months that could be a reality....
Comment by marekkolesar at 7:16pm 8th September 2008
blazinglory, in a conventional HDD you defrag it because when writing a file it is scattered about the platter. When you read a file the head has to travel to all the sectors where the file is located causing latency. When a HDD is defragmented it puts the file into continuous clusters so so the head doesnt need to travel across the disk but just increment. Because an SSD doesnt have a read head there is no seek time similar to RAM. You could defrag it but it wouldnt make any difference; although it would make writes which would wear out the disk quicker. I'm not sure how quick though.
Comment by crcampbell at 6:46pm 8th September 2008
I read somewhere that you should not defrag Solid State Drives!, i think it may be bull, but can you comfirm this please. seems stupid to me.
Comment by blazinglory at 6:25pm 8th September 2008
Is it possible to Raid those? And what is the shelf life on those things? I heard they wear out .... true?
Comment by CSQuake at 6:18pm 8th September 2008
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