Intel Intros 310 Series Mini SSDs 122
crookedvulture writes "Intel has added a couple of tiny 310 Series solid-state drives to its storage lineup. Measuring just 51 x 30 x 5.8mm, the mini-SATA SSDs are about a tenth the size of a standard notebook hard drive. Impressively, their performance ratings track with full-sized SSDs. Intel is pushing the 310 Series as a solution for dual-drive notebooks that combine solid-state and mechanical storage to give users the best of both worlds. Next-gen notebooks just got a little more interesting."
Drat (Score:5, Interesting)
Perfomance vs size (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is it impressive that a smaller solid state drive performs as well as a standard size one? What does the size have to do with anything relating to these performance benchmarks?
Re:Perfomance vs size (Score:5, Interesting)
Given Intel's formidable fab expertise and capital resources, it would not surprise me if two and three are at play here...
Re:Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Perfomance vs size (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is it impressive that a smaller solid state drive performs as well as a standard size one? What does the size have to do with anything relating to these performance benchmarks?
The speed of SSD's is linearly correlated with the number of flash chips they contain, because the flash chips are operated in parallel (think RAID0, only its implicit in the design)
Smaller would usually mean less flash chips, so less parallelism.
Windows supported TRIM before anyone else (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder how much that primitive joke of an "operating system" will derail the widespread adoption of these hybrid technologies.
The primitive joke of an operating system that introduced USB-flash based application acceleration (no such similar feature for any free operating system, and supported SSD TRIM commands before any other operating system? (OS X still doesn't and there are no announced plans to; Linux 2.6.32+, I believe, does only on a kernel level, but support amongst various filesystems seems inconsistent or not present; it's hard to tell. hdparm supports manually running TRIM using areas reported by the filesystem as free, but that's hardly equivalent to Windows, which "just works".)