Intel X25-M G2 Solid State Drives

Interesting. The joys of technology.

Just shelled out £500 for a 250gb Samsung, and its already outdated :-)

Still not clear from reading that what the prices are for the three different sizes? 80gb, 160gb, 320gb. Anyone know?
 
SSD's are already incredibly fast so you wont see much real world improvement by raid'ing them. Normal harddrives get upto 120mb/s read whereas you can get ssd's with 270mb/s ish which is over twice as fast, you're better saving your cash.
 
What he said ^^. For OS use, no discernible performance benefit by RAIDing them - there's little benefit over 70mb/sec throughput - access times is what counts, and raid0 actually increases that if anything. Plus then there's increased boot times while the raid controller sorts itself out.. hassle, and not worth it.
 
miniyazz said:
What he said ^^. For OS use, no discernible performance benefit by RAIDing them - there's little benefit over 70mb/sec throughput - access times is what counts, and raid0 actually increases that if anything. Plus then there's increased boot times while the raid controller sorts itself out.. hassle, and not worth it.
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This isn't totally correct. If you're doing anything that requires shifting large amounts of stored files into RAM then it actually makes a lot of sense to RAID 0 several SSDs. The seek times *might* be fractionally lower but with decent SSD's seek times would be <0.12MS. The benefit would be in transferring large files from a little fragmented area of the disk. At the end of the day your RAID card is saying if a file consists of 50 segments load fragments 1-25 from HDA1 and fragments 25-50 from HDA2 which given there is sufficient bandwidth from the controller card to memory always gives a performance boost. Perhaps OTT for desktop use - but it really does depend on what your doing
 
clocka said:
SSD's are already incredibly fast so you wont see much real world improvement by raid'ing them. Normal harddrives get upto 120mb/s read whereas you can get ssd's with 270mb/s ish which is over twice as fast, you're better saving your cash.
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That's not great advice imo as it depends on what your doing, say he is transferring large files, or working with large files every day, large photoshop files or large video files. Or even unrar'ing large files if he is a serial downloader. Raided drives then come into their own.
 
Here is a good benchmark to show the single SSD Vertex Random IOPS and the Vertex in Raid 0 Random IOPS.. It clearly shows the benefits of Raid.

Iometer_Random_IOPS_ICH10.jpg
 
yes thats for IOPS, if you are using the ssd's for a fileserver or something then yeah it will be faster but if you are using it for a desktop then the pc will take several seconds longer to boot and not give much of a performance increase for such an expensive 2nd drive.
 
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I agree, I deal with large CAD files and assemblies, 6gb plus and this is where I feel the difference... it's like this:

I've got two tanks of water, one on top of the other, both are the same capacity. I ned to get 10gallons (gb) to the lower tank as quickly as possible - I've only got one tap so it takes x.

If I get a raid 0 array, i've put more taps in the tank, for little files it's actually more effort opening all those taps and so just one tap is quicker, but when I've got to move huge numbers then I need all the taps I can get. Simpistic description I know but it gets the point across. When you move large files like video / photoshop / cad data you do see a huge difference, especially when the program like photoshop or Premiere/final cut keep using disc space as swap space, so are constantly writing / recalling / changing data.
 
dangerstat said:
This isn't totally correct. If you're doing anything that requires shifting large amounts of stored files into RAM then it actually makes a lot of sense to RAID 0 several SSDs. The seek times *might* be fractionally lower but with decent SSD's seek times would be <0.12MS. The benefit would be in transferring large files from a little fragmented area of the disk. At the end of the day your RAID card is saying if a file consists of 50 segments load fragments 1-25 from HDA1 and fragments 25-50 from HDA2 which given there is sufficient bandwidth from the controller card to memory always gives a performance boost. Perhaps OTT for desktop use - but it really does depend on what your doing
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That's why I said for OS use :p

Clearly in those instances where you use it for video editing or anything else involving moving large files around, you will see an improvement with better transfer rates, but still, only as long as where you are moving it to/from can also support high transfer rates, such as a RAID array.

Would be good to hear more about these drives now though, agreed.
 
I'm certainly looking forward to seeing the performance of these new Intel solid state drives.

I'm also interested in weather Intel will be releasing a firmware update for the X25-M G1 series so they support the TRIM command.
 
The high level details are pretty interesting:

•The new drives will be available in 80GB and 160GB sizes and are still called the X25-M and X18-M. The X18-M will start shipping later this quarter.

•34nm flash (down from 50nm in the original X25-M), allows Intel to include roughly twice the flash in the same size die.
•The enterprise SLC version doesn’t get the 34nm treatment at this point.
•The smaller flash die results in lower prices, the 80GB model will sell for $225 while the 160GB version should sell for $440.
•Best case read/write latency has been improved (more details below).
•The 34nm drives have a new controller and new firmware, also contributing to better performance (2 - 2.5x more 4KB random write IOPS than the old drive!). Enterprise level workstation/database apps should see an immediate performance benefit, client desktop performance is unknown. Don't expect a significant increase in PCMark or SYSMark scores, but in real world usage the new drives could feel faster.
•The new controller is Halogen-free (the old one wasn’t) so Apple could theoretically use the new drives in their systems without being un-green.
•TRIM isn’t yet supported, but the 34nm drives will get a firmware update when Windows 7 launches enabling TRIM. XP and Vista users will get a performance enhancing utility (read: manual TRIM utility). It seems that 50nm users are SOL with regards to TRIM support. Bad form Intel, very bad form.
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some interesting info, a shame the write speed hasn't gone up from 70mb/s sustained, was hoping for 130mb/s+ in 2nd gen, everything else looks very nice though, i guess we'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if its out then and made some reviews out tomorrow.
 
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