Intel Updates SSDs, Supports TRIM, Faster Writes

MojoKid writes "Intel has just released a firmware update for their 34nm Gen X25-M solid state drives that not only boosts sequential write performance, but adds support for the TRIM command as well. A performance optimization tool is also being released today, for users of Windows Vista and XP, who won't be able to take advantage of TRIM. After being flashed with the new firmware update, Intel's 34nm Gen 2 X25-M 160GB drive offered increased performance in a myriad of benchmarks shown here, and sequential write performance was increased on the order of 30%."

Re:They still are crap compared to Fusion-io

[crazypip666]

What you fail to mention is that Fusion-IO devices aren't bootable.

Re:They still are crap compared to Fusion-io

[jandrese]

Sure, if you're willing to pay $3500 for the same 80GB that you can get for $350 on the Intel drive you had better expect it to perform faster. It's literally an order of magnitude more expensive!

Re:They still are crap compared to Fusion-io

[clarkn0va]

No, but that doesn't stop me from putting a boot partition on a USB stick and / on the Fusion-io.

Now, the fact that I could buy a good used car for the price of the Fusion-io, that stops me.

Re:They still are crap compared to Fusion-io

[Happy Nuclear Death]

That's a ridiculous comparison. FusionIO cards are not anywhere near the same class at the Intel drives. They have a certain purpose and are geared toward a certain market. The Intel SSDs are a completely different beast. You can't very well use a PCI card in a notebook, which is a typical host for SSDs. The Intel SSDs are coming pretty close to maxing out the SATA 2 port, and that's all that matters for consumer-level systems. It's pretty frelling impressive. I, for one, welcome our performance-improving firmware overlords!

Intel change is great, but...

[jackb_guppy]

I have found for my kids ACER Netbooks with XP HOME that Flashfire "fixes" the slow down. http://flashfire.org/ [flashfire.org]
Was night and day during start up alone. Improved Firefox even after cutting most of it cache storage,

Also found running defrags helped a lot. Using both IO BIT Smartdefrag http://www.iobit.com/iobitsmartdefrag.html [iobit.com] and Page Defrag http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897426.aspx [microsoft.com]