Intel Replaces Consumer SSD Line, Nixes SLC-SSD

Lucas123 writes "Intel today launched a line of consumer solid state drives that replaces the industry's best selling X25-M line. The new 320 series SSD doubles the top capacity over the X25-M drives to 600GB, doubles sequential write speeds, and drops the price as much as 30% or $100 on some models. Intel also revealed its consumer SSDs have been outselling its enterprise-class SSDs in data centers, so it plans to drop its series of single-level cell NAND flash SSDs and create a new series of SSDs based on multi-level cell NAND for servers and storage arrays. Unlike its last SSD launch, which saw Intel use Marvell's controller, the company said it stuck with its own processing technology with this series."

Re:*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[XanC]

Because SLCs survive for two orders of magnitude more writes than MLCs.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[PRMan]

I already have 8GB on my home server and that makes very little difference from 4GB since it sits idle at ~4GB most of the time. But the SSD made a world of difference. A 2-3 minute boot became 25 seconds. A 1+ minute shutdown became about 5 seconds. I don't worry about reboots anymore, because it's around 30 seconds total (instead of 5 minutes)! Game cutscenes are almost instantly skippable (within 2-3 seconds), if they allow it. EVERY program loads instantly. Installs take mere seconds (even OpenOffice or Office 2007).

BTW, my RAM maxes out at 24 GB on this board, but if you told me the 24GB would help more than the 64GB SSD (about $90), you would be doing me a horrific disservice.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to have two regular HD's in RAID 0, now I have two SSD's in RAID 0. There is simply no comparison. SSD's absolutely blow away traditional Hard Drives, it's not about the Mb/sec... it's about the I/O's per second, and in this sense SSD's are about 70-100 times faster than traditional disks. Photoshop, Office, Firefox, everything opens instantly. I can even open 5 programs at once and they still all open instantly. This can all be done with 4GB of ram too, no need to buy more memory to make up for having a slow disk array anymore. Even with 2GB of ram it's still insanely fast.

Oh and a virus scan takes about 90 seconds, and I don't even notice it running, everything still opens instantly even with it running in the background... try that with your Raptor Raid 0 array.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Ndkchk]

SSDs affect other things besides just speed. I put one in my netbook and battery life went from six hours to eight - and it boots in fifteen seconds and starts programs almost instantly. The difference in power consumption matters less in a bigger laptop, but it would still help. I also don't see why you're talking about an SSD and a 2TB drive as a binary choice. The "average user" doesn't need 2TB; they already have enough space with the ~500GB that came with their Dell. They could get an SSD, keep the hard drive they already have, get someone to move the Windows install, and have the best of both worlds.

The SSD speed is of a different magnitude

[aussersterne]

There's no comparison between the 5,600-10,000 RPM gap and the HDD-SSD gap.

I took the plunge last year and installed X-25M drives in my desktop and laptop as OS drives, with secondary drives for user data. The difference is the single greatest performance jump I've ever experienced in 30 years of upgrading, going even back to the days of replacing clock generators on mainboards to overclock 8-bit CPUs by 50 percent.

There is literally a several-orders-of-magnitude difference in the overall speed of the system. If you haven't experienced it, a description of the difference doesn't sound credible, but a multi-drive RAID-0 array of 10k drives doesn't come close to a single SSD in terms of throughput.

I can't go back to non-SSD OS installs now. Systems without an SSD literally seem to crawl, as if stuck in a time warp of some kind. Non-SSD systems seem, frankly, absurdly slow.