Intel X25-M G2 Solid State Drives

dont think the 320GB will be out for a while, couldn't find anything from googling product numbers on that, not a big deal as no-one needs an SSD that big.
 
more official press release information:

http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-Outs-34nm-80GB160GB-X18M--X25M-SSDs/

intel-34nm-ssd.jpg
 
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dangerstat said:
Really disappointing there's no news from OcUK on this :/
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wow, they where just announced, give em some time.

also i heard that the 320GB intel is coming but it wont be a performance drive, i heard it could be slower, as its 320GB they want to keep the prices fairly low compared to the last drives.
 
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Any actual review out yet?

Anandtech have the preliminary spec assessment up.

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=3605

IOPS is much higher and TRIM support should be enabled. As well as a price cut of 80GB from $345 to $225. Thats about a 1/3rd of the price. If the UK price is roughly ~£250 at UK stores of first gen, then the new gen should be around ~£165.
 
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Why sustainted writes are not so important.

The sustained write speed is not a big issue. What matters most with SSD's or HDD's is random read/write performance, and it's gone up even more with these new ones. I've owned enough SSD's to know this first hand.
Higher sustained read/writes are sometimes more important for advertising than actual user benefit as the manufacture often has to sacrifice random read/write performance, which is FAR more important and used FAR more than sustained read/write.

Anand also points this out with the OCZ Vertex before they fixed the problem of these SSD's before release:
As soon as I hit the desktop I knew there was a problem; all of my icons took longer than they should’ve to load. It took about 30 minutes of actual usage for the drive to stutter and within a couple of hours performance got so unbearable that I had to pull it out.
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Thats what you get from poor random read/write performance. Because OCZ are not arse bandits they listened to Anand and now have great fast, non-stuttering drives. But it meant sacrificing some sustained read/write performance for advertising purposes, for the uninformed mases. A tough decision for a company.

Unless a user is constantly copying very large files (in the GB's) with these intel SSD's then the lower sustained write will be a issue, although it still wont exactly be slow at it. But who constantly does this? The vast amount of stuff people do requires good random read/write of smaller files -- game loading, game/software installing, opening/closing software, OS responsiveness, computer start up/shut down - these drives will be the fastest around for this. The first gen intel drives are already the fastest at these things.
 
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Spit said:
http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3605
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Excellent, thank you for the link.

Well, it's certainly disappointing that Intel aren't supporting the TRIM command for the their current X25-M solid state series. I would have expected better from Intel to be honest.

I'm definitely interested in Intel's second generation solid state drives though and hopefully Overclockers stock them.

I have just had a look on Overclockers and it seems they have removed the Intel X25-M solid state drive series.
 
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LeJimster said:
makes me laugh how Intel think these prices are cheap. The 80GB drive should be closer to £100 imo and the 160GB closer to £200 to even start looking attractive.
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Err i think you meant "to even start looking attractive to me"

These are high end SSD's. And Intel have no real competition, as these drives are faster than competing priced SSD's. They will sell well.
 
Thats a interesting review. The Intel drives deffo seems the ones to get. When are they due in a OCUK?

Andy
 
PC Perspective have also released a review about the Intel X25-M Second Generation Solid State Drive:

Intel X25-M 'G2' 34nm 160GB SSD Review

The nice thing about the Intel X25-M solid state series is that they're very resilient drives.

Anandtech said:
How Long Will Intel's SSDs Last?

SSD lifespans are usually quantified in the number of erase/program cycles a block can go through before it is unusable, as I mentioned earlier it's generally 10,000 cycles for MLC flash and 100,000 cycles for SLC. Neither of these numbers are particularly user friendly since only the SSD itself is aware of how many blocks it has programmed. Intel wanted to represent its SSD lifespan as a function of the amount of data written per day, so Intel met with a number of OEMs and collectively they came up with a target figure: 20GB per day. OEMs wanted assurances that a user could write 20GB of data per day to these drives and still have them last, guaranteed, for five years. Intel had no problems with that.

Intel went one step further and delivered 5x what the OEMs requested. Thus Intel will guarantee that you can write 100GB of data to one of its MLC SSDs every day, for the next five years, and your data will remain intact. The drives only ship with a 3 year warranty but I suspect that there'd be some recourse if you could prove that Intel's 100GB/day promise was false.
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Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives - How Long Will Intel's SSDs Last? (Page 4)

The Tech Report said:
So the X25-M shouldn't be short on performance, but what about longevity? MLC-based flash memory cells are limited to 10,000 write-erase cycles, giving solid-state drives a finite lifespan. When estimating the operating life of their drives, other SSD makers generally rely on a basic formula to calculate the number of cycles used:

Cycles = (Host writes) / (Drive capacity)

Intel says this formula oversimplifies the issue, and that two other factors must be considered. The first of these variables is write amplification, which refers to the amount of data actually written to a drive for a given write request. Intel gives an example in which a host system generates a 4KB write request that, thanks to a drive's 128KB erase block size, actually incurs a 128KB NAND write. Dividing the NAND write size by the request size yields the amplification factor, which is 32 in this case. Intel says the X25-M's write-amplification factor is extremely low at 1.1, while "traditional" SSDs have much higher amplification factor of 20.

The efficiency of wear-leveling algorithms also has a hand in determining an SSD's lifespan. If a drive is going to shuffle bits around to avoid bad cells and more efficiently use those available, it must do so without wasting precious write-erase cycles. Intel estimates the X25-M's wear-leveling efficiency factor at less than 1.1, claiming that traditional SSDs have an efficiency factor of 3.

Taking write-amplification and wear-leveling efficiency into account, Intel says the correct formula for cycling is as follows:

Cycles = (Host writes) * (Write amplification factor) * (Wear leveling factor) / (Drive capacity)

Using a write-amplification factor of 1.1 and a wear-leveling efficiency factor of 1.1, 20GB of write-erase per day for five years should consume only about 550 cycles on an 80GB X25-M. Using "traditional" SSD technology with an amplification factor of 20 and an efficiency factor of 3, the same write-erase load would use over 27,000 cycles. That's a huge difference, and to be fair, it's one that relies on values provided by Intel that aren't entirely consistent. Another Intel presentation from IDF estimates that "mediocre" SSDs have a write-amplification factor of 10 and a wear-leveling efficiency factor of 5, resulting in just under 23,000 cycles for our 20GB of write-erase per day example. That presentation also pegs the X25-M's efficiency factor at 1.04 rather than 1.1. We can't easily test a drive's lifespan ourselves, but we did ask Samsung for the write-amplification and wear-leveling efficiency factor values for its SSDs. Samsung hasn't responded yet, though.

If you don't want to crunch through the math, Intel estimates that the 80GB X25-M will last for five years with "much greater than" 100GB of write-erase per day. That's a relatively long time for much more data than most folks are likely to write or erase on a daily basis.
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Intel's X25-M solid-state drive

I will definitely be purchasing one of these drives.
 
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Ok, I have just seen the OCZ Agility 120GB for £230 on this week only. How does this compare to the intels? The andtech review to me they looked close. Also this agility is way cheaper than the intel.

All I want is a snappy OS drive, I will not moving large files. Is the Agility for me? or do I go ghetto and get a sammy gen 1 SSD 64gb drive for £92? Then buy something flash (pun intended) in 2-3 years time.
 
Oxy said:
Ok, I have just seen the OCZ Agility 120GB for £230 on this week only. How does this compare to the intels? The andtech review to me they looked close. Also this agility is way cheaper than the intel.
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For daily use the intel will wipe the floor with the OCZ :D

Andy
 
Oxy said:
All I want is a snappy OS drive, I will not moving large files. Is the Agility for me? or do I go ghetto and get a sammy gen 1 SSD 64gb drive for £92? Then buy something flash (pun intended) in 2-3 years time.
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Either the OCZ Agility or the first generation Samsung drive should be fine. In terms of raw speed though, life span and performance degradation, then the Intel drives are a lot better than the competition. Weather the price increase justify's this is completely subjective. In my opinion though, it certainly does, without a shadow of a doubt.
 
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