Intel Unveils SSDs With 6Gbit/Sec Throughput 197
CWmike writes "Intel announced a new line of solid-state drives (SSDs) on Monday that are based on the serial ATA (SATA) 3.0 specification, which doubles I/O throughput compared to previous generation SSDs. Using the SATA 3.0 specs, Intel's new 510 Series gets 6Gbit/sec. performance and thus can take full advantage of the company's transition to higher speed 'Thunderbolt' SATA bus interfaces on the recently introduced second generation Intel Core processor platforms. Supporting data transfers of up to 500MB/sec, the Intel SSD 510 doubles the sequential read speeds and more than triples the sequential write speeds of Intel's SATA 2.0 SSDs. The drives offer sequential write speeds of up to 315MB/sec."
Re:Finally, decent write speed from Intel ... (Score:5, Interesting)
The cost of an SSD is paid back by the speed, not the capacity. What I find strange is that shops list SSD's by EUR/GB instead of EUR * s/MB. The speed is the defining attribute, not the capacity.
Re:Wear usage? (Score:4, Interesting)
Do you know how many writes the swap file gets every hour you use your computer
Not specifically, but my OS - like pretty much any modern OS - gives me a disk I/O total since the last reboot. I last rebooted 11 days ago. Since then, I've written just under 50GB, and read 27.6GB. I don't think reads wear out flash, so we'll ignore the second number. That works out at 1660GB written per year, if the last 11 days have been representative. Assuming perfect weak levelling, that's 6.4 rewrite cycles per year for a 256GB SSD. A drive that can 'only' handle 3,000 rewrites will therefore wear out after about 450 years. If it does a tenth as well as that, then it will last for almost as long as hard drives have existed.
The advantage of hybrids is the same as the advantage of CPU cache - you get almost the same performance as a very large SSD for a much lower price. Given infinite funds, you'd build a computer that had gigabytes of SRAM, but it's much more expensive than DRAM, so you only have a few megabytes of SRAM and a lot of DRAM, which gives you almost as good performance but costs vastly less (the relative complexity means that the lower bound for SRAM is about six times the price per bit of DRAM - in practice it's higher). If someone else is paying, I'd take the pure SSD solution. If I had to balance price against performance, then ZFS's L2ARC is currently likely to be the best solution (unless it's a laptop, where space is an issue).
It's worth noting that Oracle is currently looking at using rotating disks as L3ARC, with tapes as the persistent storage. Writes remain fast, because ZFS is copy-on-write, so every write to the tape is just an append operation, but L3 cache misses are very expensive (you need to seek the tape, which can take several seconds, rather than several milliseconds) - for write-heavy workloads, it can give very good performance per dollar.