Intel Announces More Efficient, Much Cheaper Solid-State Drives

[1cooldude]

Intel made a splash when it launched its first solid-state drive (SSD) last year: Its models delivered the best performance we'd seen on SSD to that point. The company today announces its second-generation drive, the Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drive (SSD). This new 2.5-inch drive, available in the same capacities as before--80GB and 160GB--uses smaller and less expensive 34nm NAND multilevel-cell flash memory, which translates into big cost savings for consumers.

The previous X25-M used 50nm flash circuits. Intel says the new iteration has improved on some aspects of performance, with up to a 25 percent reduction in latency (which translates into greater speed for accessing data); Intel says a standard hard drive's latency spec would be at 4000 microseconds, while the new X25-M carries a rating of just 65 microseconds. The new drive also has faster random-write input/output operations per second (IOPS) compared with the first-generation model: It's up to two-and-half-times as fast for the 160GB model, and two times as fast for the 80GB. Intel says the 80GB model can deliver up to 6600 4KB write IOPS performance, while the 160GB model can achieve 8600 IOPS. The drives also feature a similar boost in random write performance, which Intel says will translate into faster system and application responsiveness.

Notably, Intel rates the life expectancy of these mainstream drives at 1.2 million hours mean time between failures. Only enterprise-class magnetic hard drives are given comparable ratings by hard-drive makers.

The new X25-M models carry significantly lower prices as compared with the previous-generation drives. Now, the X-25M 80GB has a channel price of $225 (compared with $595 a year ago), and the 160GB version has a channel price of $440 (down from $945).

Intel's price move is bound to make SSD a more affordable and viable option for consumers than it has been thus far. The X25-M drives still carry a price and capacity premium--storage-hungry fiends will look to hard drives with more than triple the capacity, not to the Intel SSDs to satisfy their needs. But SSD has its strengths, especially if you're using it for disk-read intensive tasks. I anticipate more SSD makers will turn to the new flash chips to achieve competitive pricing with Intel; and the new pricing should help drive SSD adoption, which has been slow to take off over the past couple of years.

Source...

[norm1515]

Ever since one of my hard drives died due to mechanical failure, I've been keeping my eye on solid state drives (and obsessively backing up my files :biglaugh:). There are little to no moving parts in them, so mechanical failure is nothing to worry about. You can throw one against a brick wall, pick it up, plug it back in, and all your data will be safe and sound. That's why they're perfect for mobile devices like netbooks. I've got a solid state drive in my eee pc. Its fast, holds a lot, and I've never had problems with it.

The only drawback is price, but with time, solid state drives will undoubtedly become more affordable. They're the perfect place to put all the 400 gigs of music you downloaded on bit torrent. :haha:

[fleecy]

after the close calls i've had with ours, i think i'll pony up the extra money for the peace of mind.

[mountain_rage]

Just because its solid state, does not mean it will last forever. Solid state drives have a lifecycle just like regular hard drives. Or in the words of Wikipedia

Limited write (erase) cycles: Flash-memory cells will often wear out after 1,000 to 10,000 write cycles for MLC, and up to 100,000 write cycles for SLC[18], while high endurance cells may have an endurance of 1–5 million write cycles (many log files, file allocation tables, and other commonly used parts of the file system exceed this over the lifetime of a computer).[34][35][36] Special file systems or firmware designs can mitigate this problem by spreading writes over the entire device (so-called wear leveling), rather than rewriting files in place.[37] In 2008 wear leveling was just beginning to be incorporated into consumer level devices.[18] However, effective write cycles can be much less, because when a write request is made to a particular memory block, all data in the block is overwritten even when only part of the memory is altered. The write amplification, as referred by Intel, can be reduced using write memory buffer.[38] In combination with wear leveling, over-provisioning SSD flash drives with spared memory capacity also delays the loss of user-accessible memory capacity. NAND memory can be negatively impacted by read and program (write) disturbs arising from over accessing a particular NAND location. This overuse of NAND locations causes bits within the NAND block to erroneously change values. Wear leveling, by redirecting SSD writes to lesser-used NAND locations, thus reduces the potential for program or write disturbs.[39] An example for the lifetime of SSD is explained in detail in this wiki.[dubious – discuss] SSDs based on DRAM, however, do not suffer from this problem.

• As a result of wear leveling and write combining, the performance of SSDs degrades with use [40][41]. Eventually, wear leveling will use each page on the drive at least once, so further writes always involve a block erase. Although write combining (if supported by the device) offers advantages, it causes internal fragmentation in the SSD which degrades the sequential read speed. However, such fragmentation can be mitigated by the operating system, using the TRIM command.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

[fleecy]

still likely better than what i have in place now. hopefully it'll soon be time to upgrade.