Hankering for an
SSD that's as big as your traditional HDD? So is Intel, or so we hear. In fact, we've been hearing whispers that a capacious 320GB solid state drive was
in the works since January, and now those whispers have been upgraded to library-like voices. According to the generally reliable
Golum, Intel's so-called Postville SSD family is well on its way to reality, and with them should come much needed price drops. The new series should top out at 320GB, with an 80GB and 160GB version falling underneath. Word on the street has it that both of the smaller two will be around $100 cheaper than the same-sized
X25-M drives, though there's been no leaks on the 320GB model's MSRP. Still, Intel has a golden opportunity here if it'll just get these things to market -- a cheap(er) SSD with a brand name like Intel could blow the solid state market wide open.
[Thanks,
Marius]
posted Jul 18th 2009 8:33AM
Oh ya.
Almost forgot to comment on the article.
Uh, Ya. Interesting technology. I think for most people, including myself, the price drop is the biggest news here. Yay for semi-affordable solid state drives!
Yup...price drop is the most important for me. Can't wait until I can actually afford to slam one of these into my laptop. Although I'll actually have to buy a new laptop for that because this damned T61 won't support the full speed of the SSD.
I think it's still too expansive right now...
Don't get me wrong. I still think it's crazy expensive, but any movement in the "less expensive" direction is a good thing.
No, it's quite small.
(thatswhatshesaid)
I bet that's what she said. *oh snap*
maybe apple will come and buy up lots, and sell them in a new device, just like they did with the ipod mini
Really? I don't think you can ever be too "expansive" with storage ;-)
Dell has been buying lots and lots of Samsung SSDs and their SSD upgrade options are relatively cheap - IIRC $250 upgrade from a 500GB 5,400rpm hard drive.
I don't think the per GB price matters as much if the SSD is just a boot/application/important files drive used in conjunction with another drive. Which is a set-up for a lot of laptop users anyways - smaller internal drive, large external drive usually left at home for storing media.
Oh,,perhaps you good guys mistaken me, my english is poor...i said that just meaning "it's so expensive, and i can't afford it right now"
ah..i know...it is me that mistaken "expensive" with "expansive"
Sorry for my poor English...
a big price cut welcome
Capacity
Price
Performance
Currently SSD is 1 of 3 but still is far away from perfection.
Capacity is pretty good too, 320GB is probably enough for most people. Just the price to go.
Capacity is up there too. Here is a link to a 512GB SSD from Super Talent:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820609415
@sk: Yeah ... here's the thing. That drive costs about as much as people want to spend on an entire system.
@Sakerin, agreed, so performance and capacity is 2 of the tree now the price is the last hurdle.
I suspect that by next Christmas, we'll have SSDs that many of us will be able to just afford, at least for our system drives.
That's what I'm looking for - something to hold Win 7 and the bulk of my installed programs. The rest of my data, like photos, videos, media, documents, etc. will all be on "traditional" hard drive storage.
Of course, we need something like Intel's drives since many of the other still stutter and lag with lots of little random data writes, which is unacceptable to me.
Seriously for many people capacity is fine - even without the 512GB remortgage-your-house drives.
My work PC has a 40GB HD. Seriously. It's not even THAT old. (Three, four years?) And yes that isn't enough... My home PC has 120GB but I don't actually need all of that - I've got 20GB free at the moment, and if I got off my lazy arse and archived older photos to DVD, that'd jump up to 60GB free. For a new home PC for me, 100GB would be fine, maybe 80 at a pinch. For a netbook, ie anything that isn't my main PC, I'd be happy with 32GB.
Of course some people have and need hundreds of gigabytes - they download (and keep) HD films, or have large porn collections, or are professional photographers, or play (and keep) PC games, etc. That might even be a high proportion of people who read gadget sites. But it's not everyone.
There's still the 'price' issue - 100GB or even 80GB of quality SSD remains expensive - but for a large proportion of people, I don't think capacity is a major problem (even without the option of external secondary drives for media).
@me: oh yeah, and for that 40GB work computer, although I do want more space, random read (and to lesser extent, write) performance is actually my biggest issue with it. Obviously the drive is really slow as well as small. When they finally upgrade my computer I might see if I can swing an SSD for that reason :) Yeah, probably not.
Another 2 years and we'll have cheap, extremely fast, reliable, shock resistant, cool to the touch, drives. Hooray?
I feel the same way about iPhones.
as they enhance your pc's performance like no other component can, they're worth the money.
yes, I have them. I love them.
Now with the new prices, I can switch some more pc's around here, can't wait :)
To everyone that is still hesitating to upgrade:
I made the switch over to a SSD from OCZ (Vertex II) and I'm telling you its the best $100 I have spent in the last 5 years on any computer part. I put Windows 7 RC on it and all my frequently used apps. The system jumped from an average computer to super fast. Windows boots up in just under 17 seconds and apps launch in the blink of an eye.
I'm looking to upgrade all my other computers as well and hope that capacity goes up and prices will continue to fall.
which one did you buy? where did you purchase it?
I got the 30GB Vertex II from Newegg. About a month ago it was offered as a shell shocker for $99. Now it sells for $149 minus $20 mail in rebate:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227393
$100 SSD? I knew it was too good to be true.
$100 cheaper makes the cheapest about the same price as the ocz vertex drives BUT the write speed of the intel drives is only 70mb/s, if the speeds are 270mb/s read and 210mb/s write and with the price drops then i'll buy the 80gb drive however i doubt the speed increases will be huge, alot of the other manufacturers have pretty much caught up with speed in terms of intel's current offerings.
Yea, but intel has the best random performance at small writes, where as the others are good at sequential writes. Small random is good for day to day tasks, and sequential is good for ripping a dvd to your drive. Most people get small drives, so whats the point of having a crazy high sequential? The random small writes is the key to speed!
I'm more concerned for TRIM support, since that will help with the speed degradation problem and the TRIM command is supported by Windows 7. OCZ's been great about supporting TRIM, but Intel really needs to get around to it. Hopefully they'll add TRIM support to the older X25's too - they were premium products when they first came out, and still are, depending on PoV.
SSDs, i cant wait till they drop in price significantly, but one thing bugs me about them. They are SSDs, so there are no moving parts, why cant there be a 3.5" variant or even a 5.25" variant? I understand why there cannot be a 5.25" HDD variant (due to the fact that at such high speeds, the platter would be be pulling several hundred G's at the outer edge), it just seems weird.
Answered my own question with some research, http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/02/ocz-intros-3-5-inch-colossus-ssd-at-computex/, but still, why not 5.25" ones either?
Sure they could get it to a higher capacity at a bigger size, but the price would be immense.
And anyways, laptop drives are 2.5" and they would benefit the most from an ssd considering their much higher shock resistance as compared to hdds.
@Matt
Comment #1 mmmm idk, it is very possible no doubt, but look at the market for HDD's 2.5" vs 3.5" market, i would assume the same would carry over relatively the same when it would come to SSDs touting 3.5 or even 5.25 over the 2.5
Comment #2 the big selling point about these SSDs isnt just shock resistance, it is that plus the fact that they have extremely high write/read speeds in comparison to SATA or SCSI (i think, at least the price vs performance SCSI vs SSD is better for SSD), which is HIGHLY beneficial for multiple applications (ex. video editing, data base cache disk)
Simple answer?
The market for 5.25" storage drives doesn't exist, and there's no reason to create it.
You could, but you'd be wasting space because Flash memory is just that small (physically).
There's little to no reason to have 3.5" or 5.25" drives SSDs when they can fit in a smaller form factor.
With a 2.5" laptop drive, you can use it in a laptop or desktop. And if you only have 3.5" or 5.25" bays, simply get a bay adapter, they're super cheap and were a dime a dozen when the transition from 5.25" to 3.5" drives were happening.
If you make it 3.5" or bigger, you're unnecessarily limiting the market that you can sell too.
@Joe
Or expanding it, just by keeping it in the 2.5" factor area you limit the market you sell to, contrary to what you just said.
I can see how a 5.25" wouldnt be good to sell (probably be over priced, etc), but 3.5" 's would be very useful to have (ex. video editing, server caching, etc) Professionals want high performance, low cost, 2.5" drives do not equal both. What would you rather have, 4x 256GB 2.5" SSDs in RAID0 taking up 4 drive slots (maybe only 2x 5.25" with a nicely done adapter) costing 1200$ (exemplary figures) or 2x 1TB 3.5" SSDs in RAID0 taking up 2 drive slots (or 1x 5.25") costing 500$, with room left over for all the other optical/breakout boxes. This would be specifically for video editors and the like who need high speeds and a large amount of room on demand.
@ilikespie
or you could simply use something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111060
and put those four 2.5" drives in the space of 2 3.5" HDD's.
There is no need for 3.5" SSD drives.
I found the first listings for the 80 and 160GB drives. Prices are at $246 and $486 which is slightly higher than offerings from ocz and others with the Indilinx controller. Neither of the companies shows any further specs. (nextwarehouse.com, buy.com and fadfusion.com)
80GB Mfg Part#: SSDSA2MH080G2C1
160GB Mfg Part#: SSDSA2MH160G2C1
That's still $3 per GB. I think the sweet spot should be no more than $1 per GB. But that's probably not gonna happen any time soon. Especial if you consider that this new generation is using the smallest flash memory available today. It will take at least another 1 - 2 years before we see anything smaller than 34nm in the flash memory market. The next generation is 22nm but mass production is not expected to ramp up any time soon.
@Gungel, Intel and Micron, which produces the 34nm flash memory, is just one manufacturer of solid state flash memory. Others will follow with less expensive 32nm and 22nm chips. Check out this link for more on new copper barrier/seed PVD for solid state flash memory from Applied Materials which claims a 40% in cost reduction.
forgot the link:
http://www.solid-state.com/display_article/363806/5/none/none/TCHNE/Applied-targets-22nm-copper-barrier/seed-PVD
@myself
"in comparison to SATA or SCSI" should say "in comparison to SATA or SCSI HDD's"
ment to reply to myself in my previous post T_T
sk, there are 2 uk places with those models on pre-order, cheapest for 80gb is £173: http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=SSDSA2MH080G2C1
those models are also listed on here: http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/products/nand/feature/index.htm
these are on sale on 21st july btw.
How reliable are SSDs compared to a regular HD? Is the data as safe or safer?
They have a similar lifespan under normal conditions but SSDs are much more durable and you know exactly when they are going to die according to software.
Mostly it's that they're not prone to having the disk just stop working because the spinning parts are messed up. Also there's no moving parts, so they're immune to shock damage, which matters for a mobile laptop.
You act like that would be the largest SSD on the market...super talent already has a 512gb model. Yes...its from the masterseries not the faster ultradrive me series with barefoot controller (just like ocz), but it does exist.
I have a 64gb ssd and i'm very happy with it. 128gb would be nice, but for the price, I don't see myself spending too much over $200 for an ssd
I hate my Titan drive - would love to replace it with this one....
Let me be the first to say DO WANT!
But seriously, no SSD out there has matched the x-25 yet, i cant wait to see benchmarks on the 320gb model! I can however, wait to see the price :-P
I don't agree. The OCZ Vertex II is about equal to the Intel X25-M on every benchmark except on random write performance and in real world performance it pulls way ahead. Programs start almost 1/3 faster on the Vertex compared to the X25-M.
For most people that install the OS and other static files such as programs only, random write speed is a no issue.
I guess it all depends what the disk is used for.
@sk.
No.
In REAL WORLD performance, the INtel drive blows away even the Vertex series OCZ drives.
REAL world performance is all about random read/write performance. This is where the Intel drives blow away ANYTHING else available right now, including SCSI and SAS drives. In fact, a single Intel X-25 will beat a three drive striped RAID array of even the fastest SAS drives (let alone any other rotational drives) in random read/write performance.
the reason SAS drives are still used in high end SAN devices is their ease of purchase, and the fact that a typical SAN has dozens of drives in it to overcome the small random access times of rotational drives by simply having more drives rotating.
If you took a SAN and loaded it with SSD drives, it would be an order of magnitude faster (if the controllers could utilize their speed).
Artificial benchmark scoring of sequential read/write performance is merely e-peen bragging rights.
Oh wow, no way dude that is just too cool!
TITS
First picture and benchmark of the new drive http://nueda.main.jp/blog/archives/004532.html
If that benchmark is correct than this disk is no match to the older X25-M or OCZ Vertex II or any other Indilinx based drive. 179MB/s is way to slow for a disk in this price range.
Compare: Sequential read performance for the X25M is 230MB/s and 256MB/s for the Vertex II.
I hope for Intel's sake that this benchmark does not reflect the real performance of this drive.
@sk
Again, only an uneducated fool would care about sequential read/write speeds.
the random read/write is all that matters in the real world.
unless of course all you do is store very large files, like complete DVD rips and Blu Ray rips, and do nothing else on your computer.
which isn't real world at all.
This is great, and it will force others to cut their prices.. not to mention OCZ, Samsung, and Corsair will also be using 34nm flash pretty soon as well.
** And for all the people talking about how expensive SSDs are, you need to reconsider your perspective. Enthusiasts spend thousands of dollars on their PCs and laptops, and will spend $400-500 on a new graphics card. And the upgrade that will provide the greatest increase in overall performance during daily usage is an SSD. No contest. With a desktop computer, you only need a fast SSD for your OS+applications boot drive and you can pick up a cutting edge 64GB drive for about $200. For laptops, you can pick up a premium 128GB drive for about $350 or less. If you are sitting on the fence, trust me, it will be the best upgrade you ever make on a computer.
Wewt now its only like 400 bucks! yeah like i'm really gonna buy that. i can get like 4 terabytes for that same amount.
I think I will still wait until the first drives with TRIM and Sata 6gb are released.
1) TRIM will be supported via a firmware update most likely on all Indilinx and samung drives. I believe OCZ has announced their support.
2) There isn't a normal form factor SSD on the market that can saturate SATA/300, so it is sort of pointless at this point in time. Similarly, if you want FAST, then get two OCZ Vertex drives and run them in RAID0. Blazing!
* BTW, SATA6 has been delayed and pulled off of new motherboards because of a problem in the Marvel controller.
I'll wait on 3200GB drive.
Still gona wait for fusion ioxtreme pcie x4 SSD...its gamer/enthusiast model will be out soon and will be made bootable slightly later with an update....will blow these away as regards performance...to me thats what SSD is about...performance for you OS and most used apps....if you want more capacity just sling in a secondary conventional HDD.
I also made the jump to SSD and bought an Intel X25-M 80GB as a boot drive - all i can say is WOW - 30sec boot times in vista 64 - you click and you blink and a program is open. You can OC what you want or Raid 0 what you want - SSD really is the best upgrade you can ever do your system. Whether its a lot of money really depends where you coming from - i will never look back . I even upgraded my laptop with a Vertex 120GB - Intel much faster though. With the new ones coming out prices on the old ones should drop a little i'd wait until then and get them
Why does SLC cost so much more than MLC? From what I've read, MLC only cuts the number of transistors needed in half, yet the price for an SLC drive is often more than four times the price of a similar MLC drive.
Also, SLC is much faster and has about ten times the durability (write cycles) of MLC.
Don't get me wrong. I'm hoping ssd's go down in price and get better. But, you say in 2 years we'll have drives that are better and more affordable than normal harddrives. Not to be old fashioned, but SCSI drives have been around for almost 2 decades, and they perform extremely well. They are also PROVEN to be reliable and very long lasting. A 15k rpm drive will be fast enough for just about anything, and will last a decade. I worry about the longevity of ssd's, and their sustained performance. I hope my worries are wrong though.
you must not work with SCSI drives in an enterprise environment then.
they are fast approaching the dinosaur stage and have for the most part been replaced by SAS drives over the last 5 years.
and SCSI drives were always too slow for enterprise storage or large SAN appliances, that's why people made SAN's.
Take as many drives as you can, that are as fast as you can get, and put them in one appliance that has the backplane bandwidth to take advantage of the drives all at once.
even when SCSI drives were popular, they were almost always run in large RAID arrays to get the needed speed out of them.
Now compared to IDE, yes they were faster and had much better random performance, however with the advent of SATA drives with NCQ built in, and more importantly SAS drives with BETTER NCQ support, SCSI became an obsolete dinosaur.
And they were not "more reliable" they were simply installed in better places.
which is more conducive to long hdd life, a pc case shoved under some random fools desk and sucking up dirt and crap and having clogged air vents until something dies from overheating, or a server case that is designed to move air through it all the time, in a well managed and CLEAN data center?
now you know why SCSI drives tend to last forever.
question about ocz. do they even own any fab? don't they just buy the leftover nand from other companies? i would trust intel or samsung ssd more since they produce their own flash and cherrypick their best stuff for ssd.