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Intel's 2.5" and 1.8" SSDs  (Source: Intel)

Intel SSD Roadmap  (Source: Expreview)
Intel SSDs will have a read speed of 240MB/sec and a write speed of 170MB/s

Today the SSD market is not that big. Many consumers aren't willing to spend the significant price premium over a standard hard drive to get the benefits of an SSD. Some businesses, however, realize the potential of the SSD in an enterprise computing environment.

Expreview reports that it has an Intel roadmap that shows that three new SSDs are going to be unveiled by Intel. The SSDs will be in the X-series and are said to have a read speed of 240MB per second and write speed of 170MB per second. The SSDs will come in 2.5-inch (X25) and 1.8-inch (X18) form factors and will come in two models -- E and M. The E model is reported to be the top-of-the-line product with the highest performance, while the M model is configured for power savings.

Expreview reports that the X18-M will only consume 0.25 W of power in active mode. Capacities for the X25-E model are reported to be 32GB, 64GB, and 160GB with availability in the last quarter of 2008. An 80GB X25-M and an 80GB X18-M are reported to be launching in Q3 2008. A 160GB version of the X18-M is expected to hit the market around Q1 2009.

Micron and Intel have been working together to develop what the companies say will be the world's fastest NAND flash memory. DailyTech reported in early August that Micron had unleashed its own SSDs that offered read speeds even faster than what the Intel roadmap is claiming. Micron's SSDs claim to reach a read speed of 250MB per second.

DailyTech reported in April that Intel's SSD prototypes were going through in-house testing; odds are these are the same SSDs that are now showing up on the roadmap.

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But what about stability
By hlper on 8/15/2008 1:04:35 PM , Rating: 2
I notice that in the most recent SSD articles there has been no mention of the limited read-write capacity of SSD drives. Even in the discussion, no one brings it up. I am bringing it up because I am wondering if no one thinks this is still a problem? Are the latest generation of SSD's good enough for your precious data?

Personally, I think speed is great, but I want reliability before I give up my traditional hard drive. I will also admit am not an expert on the subject of these drives, so feel free to educate me.




RE: But what about stability
By Chadder007 on 8/15/2008 1:14:29 PM , Rating: 2
Thats what I thought about too...


RE: But what about stability
By rippleyaliens on 8/15/2008 3:45:39 PM , Rating: 5
If you rely even on a raid controller for your data.. then you are still not in the game.
SSD=low power, somewhat performance, but IO- it the Main advantage of SSD.
100mb in/out, who cares. BUT >>30k Disk IO now that is what i want. I have 2x 300SAS 15k drives, probably the fastest on the market. Raid controller. I stripe the drives.. If i loose 1, i wait on the warranty, if the raid gets hosed. then i just Re - Acronis the system back. takes me 15min to do a restore. Complete restore. Now for my critical DATA, that is on my server, running raid6. HORRIBLE write speeds. compared to my sas drive. BUT it is on 1) second server, 2) Mission critical stuff, is burned to DVD. and also backup to tape.

Stability, these drives , even if they last just 2 years of HEAVY usage, its worth it. For in 2 years, there will be a 2x maybe 3x in capacity, and possibly 2x in performance. So stability is mute. I still have usb thumb drives 3 years old, still rocking. Hard drive's still rockin...

WAYYYY back when 1.6gb WD drives hit, they were indeed the fastest.. but in 3 years when 20gb drives hit, (fall 1999), would you still want the 1.6 wd 5400 rpm, or the 20gb 7200 drive.. DUH.. Its not like you will keep a hard drive forever.. I would hope you would replace them . .. right???

CPR you only get 2 out of 3
C= Cheap
P= Performance
R= Reliability
if you want cheap but good performance you dont get reliability
If you want Cheap and Reliable- you dont get performance
If you want Performance and Reliability, it wont be cheap..


RE: But what about stability
By retrospooty on 8/15/2008 9:42:08 PM , Rating: 5
"if you want cheap but good performance you dont get reliability
If you want Cheap and Reliable- you dont get performance
If you want Performance and Reliability, it wont be cheap.. "

Or you could buy a Maxtor and get only one... cheap.


RE: But what about stability
By JackBurton on 8/15/2008 1:16:30 PM , Rating: 2
2 million hours MTBF. Is that good enough for you? :)


RE: But what about stability
By Icelight on 8/15/2008 1:20:51 PM , Rating: 2
Because of how they come to that number: No. :)


RE: But what about stability
By TomZ on 8/15/2008 1:44:53 PM , Rating: 5
MTBF doesn't model the wear-out mechanism inherent in SSD drives; it is just for "random" premature failures.

SSD wear-out can be modeled by something along the lines of a maximum amount of data that can be written to the drive before the minimum guaranteed number of flash erase/write cycles starts to be exceeded.

For example, a particular Toshiba MLC SSD drive is rated for 40TB of write activity before the minimum cycle limit begins to be hit. If you assume a 5-year desired lifespan, this works out to 44GB of writing per day. Toshiba estimates that average users write 1.4GB per day, and power users 5.2GB. Based on this model, Toshiba expects this drive to easily last more than 5 years in typical usage (with margin).

ref. http://www.toshiba.com/taec/adinfo/ssdfacts/, see SSD Myth #5.

Also, for comparison, this is for a Toshiba MLC drive. SLC drives have much higher guaranteed number of erase/write cycles, and therefore, would have a much longer expected life compared to the 5-year example above.

I don't know whether the Intel drive is SLC or MLC. Maybe the high-end one is SLC and the low-end one MLC?


RE: But what about stability
By icanhascpu on 8/15/08, Rating: 0
RE: But what about stability
By leexgx on 8/15/2008 10:36:35 PM , Rating: 2
one ssd i have seen think it was that super insane fast PCI-e 4x card that had 500gb of space and needed no power that did 900MB/s,

that drive had auto bad sector remove from the drive space pool so when an part became unwriteable it would just mark it as bad and make the drive smaller (some driver is installed to make the changes in windows auto or on next reboot)

the life of SSD are more likey to be more reliable then an spinning disk, guess i have to wait 1-2 years before i get SSD get the price to an point of an raptor (£150 or less) 200MB/s plus 0.1ms access time never need to use raid 0 agane for my use any way

on the points of dieing SSD first thing you should do on vista is turn off the auto defrag or any defrag tool (on Vista mite not be an bad idea to turn off system restore as well) as that can reduce the life of the SSD by alot SSD does not need defraging all parts of the disk go at the same speed fragmented or not (system restore makes restore points in 400MB in sizes or the system restore volume shaddow service can use as much space thats in your user folder space can bog the pc down for 30-60 mins before it gives up due to out of space or it passes 1 hr)


RE: But what about stability
By Baov on 8/16/2008 11:10:47 AM , Rating: 4
I have a EWF write filter on top of my system partition and from what it tells me, i usually don't write anything even close to 500meg a day. Given, i've optimized my system, but i don't feel like i'm missing anything.


RE: But what about stability
By Digobick on 8/15/2008 1:22:25 PM , Rating: 4
SSDs are also more reliable than HDDs. Using wear-leveling technology, SSDs offer mean time before failure (MTBF) ratings of approximately two million hours compared to typical HDD MTBF ratings of between 300,000 to 500,000 hours.


RE: But what about stability
By 306maxi on 8/15/2008 1:29:09 PM , Rating: 2
The only problem is - and correct me if I'm wrong - that there is currently no easy way to get data off a failed SSD. At least if you PC gets hit by a power surge which blows your hard drive you can get the board swapped out and get your data off. With an SSD you might as well not bother.


RE: But what about stability
By TomZ on 8/15/2008 1:48:07 PM , Rating: 5
Rather than worry about whether SSD and/or HDD can be recovered, it makes more sense to just back them up. Problem solved.


RE: But what about stability
By 306maxi on 8/15/2008 2:20:32 PM , Rating: 2
I agree. But most people like myself don't have enough money to buy a terrabyte of SSD storage in the first place. So for most people with a desktop that buy an SSD, an SSD is going to be a thing they have their OS on and they'll store all of their photos, videos and so on which don't need the high read write speeds on a traditional hard drive.


RE: But what about stability
By redly1 on 8/15/2008 3:34:56 PM , Rating: 1
But but but...what if your system gets zapped during a backup?? Then you have a Fubar'd main drive, and a Fubar'd backup. How are you going to get your data then??


RE: But what about stability
By TomZ on 8/15/2008 3:37:01 PM , Rating: 4
RE: But what about stability
By GaryJohnson on 8/15/2008 10:38:46 PM , Rating: 4
If your files are that critical you should be backing them up offsite.


RE: But what about stability
By 306maxi on 8/15/2008 1:25:33 PM , Rating: 3
Storing your holiday snaps or baby videos on these would be dumb. This is more a drive for you OS and other applications which will make be helped by the fast reads and writes. For large amounts of data magnetic storage will still be the best choice for vital data for reasons of cost and reliability.

I'll certainly be buying an SSD when prices get a bit lower. But I'll still keep my important stuff saved on a traditional magnetic storage hard drive.


RE: But what about stability
By Spectator on 8/16/2008 2:25:28 AM , Rating: 2
It would make sence to have a 2-4 gig dram partition to place the swap file on.

That would ease any fears about wearing things out quickly yes?


RE: But what about stability
By winterspan on 8/16/2008 4:50:47 AM , Rating: 2
The reason why is because it is not an issue anymore for decent SSDs. I have seen multiple articles that went into the issue, and basically they found that modern SSDs will easily last many multiples of a PCs intended lifetime. I will try to dig up some links..


wow
By Natfly on 8/15/2008 12:32:18 PM , Rating: 2