Intel 34nm SSDs Lower Prices, Raise Performance

Vigile writes "When Intel's consumer line of solid state drives were first introduced late in 2008, they impressed reviewers with their performance and reliability. Intel gained a lot of community respect by addressing some performance degradation issues found at PC Perspective by quickly releasing an updated firmware that solved those problems and then some. Now Intel has its second generation of X25-M drives available, designated by a "G2" in the model name. The SSDs are technically very similar though they use 34nm flash rather than the 50nm flash used in the originals and reduced latency times. What is really going to set these new drives apart though, both from the previous Intel offerings and their competition, are the much lower prices allowed by the increased memory density. PC Perspective has posted a full review and breakdown of the new product line that should be available next week."

$3 per GB

[tepples]

The last page of the review [pcper.com] states that these should cost you roughly $3 per GB. Whether that's "laughably expensive" depends on what you want to do with the drive.

reliability?

[Goffee71]

How can reviewers be impressed by reliability when they've only had the units for, at most, a year? When these things hit the five-year mark running perfectly well with no data loss in the home/work environment, then I'll be interested.

Ok, they may have been stress tested in factories by the manufacturers, but reviewers don't do that sort of work.

Re:I've got one of the G1 Drives

[LordKronos]

I'm not the person you were replying to, but I too bought a X25-M 80GB back in April (though I only payed $300, so I only overpaid by $75). That said:
1) I've enjoyed the increased performance over the last 4 months. I've done a lot of work where I've benefited from the increased performance, so I feel I've gotten at least a good portion of that $75 in the form of the value of increased productivity (I use this computer for work for my business).
2) I've had no performance complaints from the new drive. Compared to my old drive, there are nearly zero times that I'm waiting on disk I/O anymore, so if it might be a little slower (and look at the charts in the article...it's not 25% slower) I'm not really noticing where it could be improved.
3) Obsolete? I do not think that word means what you think it means. My G1 drive is neither "No longer in use" nor "Outmoded in design, style, or construction". It has been surpassed (very slightly) by a newer model, but if that translate to obsolete, then I guess anyone who isn't paying $1000 for a Core i7-975 CPU is also buying obsolete hardware. And of course, anyone who does buy a Core i7-975 for $1000 will promptly be mocked by you when the price drops to $900 or a new model 1/3 GHz faster comes out or something.

Re:No Battery?

[Carl Drougge]

I suspect they have a capacitor large enough to finish committing their buffers. At least they seem to see little performance degradation with write barriers, and do retain all the files they should when I pull the power while writing. (I didn't do a proper test, but it seems to work correctly, assuming your OS does.)

(And for the record, any OS that still thinks anything the HD acks is written is living in a dream world, it hasn't been true for 15 years on consumer disks.)

Re:No Battery?

[shiftless]

The OS thinks that everything ACKed as sent to the storage unit is written,

What does it matter what the OS "thinks"? When power is lost, all of its "thoughts" disappear. When you power it back on it reloads its "thoughts" from the DISK, thus there can be no confusion.