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."

Don't like this

[XanC]

MLC the only option on a server? For high-transaction databases, I don't see how it will work.

Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[sandytaru]

I'm not going to run out and replace my $100 2TB external backup with one of these any time soon. However, I've been tempted to snag a small 40 gig model and use that as my OS drive, and use my existing internal 1TB HDD for the actual data. I think the article is right, in that the price per gig needs to hit $1 before you start seeing acceptance for mass storage solutions from consumers. 95% of users can't tell the difference between a 5600 RPM HDD and a 10,000 RPM one, so they won't care about SSD speeds that much either.

*SMOOTCH!* Buh-bye Enterprise!

[Chas]

Seriously. Any sort of enterprise-level should be swearing off these things as a storage medium then. Well, maybe for a boot drive. But anything with massive amount of writes should be kept as far away from an MLC drive as possible.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[CastrTroy]

Maybe the reason users can't tell the difference between 5600 (5400??) RPM and 10,000 RPM is because for the most part what is slowing things down is the seek latency. In both those drives, they seek latency is going to be 12 ms and 7 ms respectively. Which you're right, the user probably won't notice. But a solid state drive will give you a seek time of about 0.1 ms which will make a huge difference in many situations. Most users will probably notice a change like this because seek time is probably what is slowing down the computer most of the time.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Rockoon]

The $/GB metric is often irrelevant.

Sure, I can get 3TB for $100, but for $170 I can get a very high performance SSD that is large enough (90GB) for my needs.

Why do all my computers need terabytes of storage? Thats right.. they don't. I only need large storage on shared network media. My computers need high performance storage, not stupid amounts of extra GB's.

Re:Still too pricey per gig for mass storage

[Kevin Stevens]

Considering flash was about $7.50/gb in 2007, $3.80 in 2009, and is now down to about $1.71/gb, all the while capacities are increasing, I think pricing will be "competitive" in a year or two. Also we are just beginning the release cycle of the next generation- OCZ and crucial are set to release their products this month, so price/$GB could drop further in the very immediate future. Speeds are still increasing by leaps and bounds with each generation- the new vertex 3's, in real actual use, have seen sustained transfer rates over 400 MegaBYTES per second.

Adding an SSD is the best upgrade you can do to increase performance. If you look at the videos on you tube, they show that loading even the largest, slowest apps like Photoshop, CAD, WoW, etc are more than 2x as fast as a hard disk- most app loads are instantaneou-, and thus halve boot times. SSD's use a fraction of the energy, which means cooler laptops with longer battery lives, and quieter desktops that also require less cooling. You are right that SSD's aren't suitable for mass storage, I think for at least 5 years we will see hybrid setups, and then gradually we will see a move towards SSD only systems.

There is real value in adding an SSD today though, IMHO.