Intel's New Desktop SSD Is an Overclocked Server Drive 111
crookedvulture writes "Most of Intel's recent desktop SSDs have followed a familiar formula. Combine off-the-shelf controller with next-gen NAND and firmware tweaks. Rinse. Repeat. The new 730 Series is different, though. It's based on Intel's latest datacenter SSD, which combines a proprietary controller with high-endurance NAND. In the 730 Series, these chips are clocked much higher than their usual speeds. The drive is fully validated to run at the boosted frequencies, and it's rated to endure at least 70GB of writes per day over five years. As one might expect, though, this hot-clocked server SSD is rather pricey for a desktop model. It's slated to sell for around $1/GB, which is close to double the cost of more affordable options. And the 730 Series isn't always faster than its cheaper competition. Although the drive boasts exceptional throughput with random I/O, its sequential transfer rates are nothing special."
Re:sequential transfer (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much this. Vast majority of SSDs on the market today are very similar in terms of speed in normal usage, because the bottleneck is now in SATA. You can overclock it all you want, but you'll need to start pushing disks to PCI-E or similar bus for it to start to matter.
And then there's the whole issue of "does it really matter when it's this fast on desktop?"
Performance consistency versus peaks (Score:5, Interesting)
For many (but certainly not all) applications, especially when it comes to UI, what matters is 95% worst performance, not peak throughput. From the Anandtech review [anandtech.com], that's where this drive really shines.
Different tradeoffs have to be made for different workloads -- it can't be boiled down to a single (or even a set of) number(s). Some applications are far more tolerant of worst-case performance than others.
To little, too late. (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't get me wrong, I own five discrete SSDs (all currently in active use), and they're all Intel (one G1, two G2s, and two 330s). However, I've been disappointed with Intel of late. It used to be that they came with a premium price, but also dramatically lower failure rates than the competition, and you could usually find them cheaper than the competition if you waited for the right sale.
These days, however, Samsung's failure rates are lower than Intel's, and their price premium is so large that no sale is going to get their larger SSDs anywhere near as cheap as Samsung's. I was hoping that they might make a comeback with a new consumer model, but the 730 is a disappointment in terms of its extremely poor performance-per-dollar and capacity-per-dollar.
I've bought nothing but Intel in the past, because they were the safe bet, but at this point it looks like my next SSD will be from Samsung.