New Intel SSD range

[dizietsma]

Well I am slightly disappointed. I was hoping that they would be as fast as the latest ones from other manufacturers but also be a lot cheaper due to 25nm and also have Intel reliability. It seems only the last is the case.

The reason for this is they are using the old inhouse controller still. Given their 510 series uses Marvell I wonder if they are having problems with it and so we end up with this half new half old drive.

So my wait continues. My hope is that they will bring out a new controller for refresh this year and the price of the 25nm goes down, overwise I will look at the opposition once reliability is known.

Currently an SSD is going to be my big performance buy, even my current video card can play Crysis 2 ok so no need to upgraded graphics or cpu.

 

[Grall]

I'm not buying any SSD smaller than 600GB, because if I were to buy a new unit it'd be to store my games on instead of OS/applications, but with such ridiculous prices still it means I'll have to continue waiting.

25nm flash supposedly allows ~2x the number of dies in the same area, and while yields may not scale precisely linearly, it would seem price/MB is hardly any lower at all compared to previous flash generation. I don't think yields is THAT much worse that the geometry scaling is almost entirely eaten up!

The remaining alternative is that Intel/Micron is artificially pumping up flash prices to maximize profits, not letting the scaling advantage of 25nm reach through to the price tag!

 

[pcchen]

I'm not buying any SSD smaller than 600GB, because if I were to buy a new unit it'd be to store my games on instead of OS/applications, but with such ridiculous prices still it means I'll have to continue waiting.

25nm flash supposedly allows ~2x the number of dies in the same area, and while yields may not scale precisely linearly, it would seem price/MB is hardly any lower at all compared to previous flash generation. I don't think yields is THAT much worse that the geometry scaling is almost entirely eaten up!

The remaining alternative is that Intel/Micron is artificially pumping up flash prices to maximize profits, not letting the scaling advantage of 25nm reach through to the price tag!

How about the initial investment for the 25nm fabs? They are not exactly free...

 

[Grall]

They also don't have to be written/paid off in one week, quarter or even year.

 

[swaaye]

I've been playing with a couple of Vertex 2 drives for a few months. The 60GB models. It's interesting to see which apps benefit the most from being stored on them. There seem to be two factors to consider 1) how many small files does an app use and how often does it access them 2) how hard is the CPU hit when loading an app off of a HDD because this is not a bad way to measure how the CPU will bottleneck a SSD.

Games don't really seem to benefit that much because they tend to have large archive files which HDDs don't have problems accessing fast. They also tend to be considerably CPU limited because they do a lot of processing as they load assets. And after you've loaded a game the data is now in the system cache so further accesses are much faster.

However, an example of a game that does benefit from a SSD is a massively modded Oblivion. This is because such a setup has gigabytes of assets consisting of a zillion tiny files that get accessed a lot. A SSD definitely clears up a good bit of load time and gameplay stutter.

What benefits a ton is the OS though. Absolutely everything you do with Windows is much snappier and smoother. It actually pegs all the cores of my Q6600 3.0 GHz for an instant at boot because the drive is so fast and the services and such load so quickly. It's silly. It is ALL about having your OS on a SSD. It's the biggest improvement in system responsiveness that I've ever experienced.

But if you don't have a fast CPU, a SSD is going to be less exciting than one might imagine. I suggest at least a Core 2 / Phenom 2 dual core. Otherwise you will be CPU limited often and the SSD will idle a lot. Even with the fastest CPUs out there you will be CPU limited in many cases (like installing Windows Updates for example).

I really wouldn't get caught up on SATA 3gbps vs. 6gbps drives because the 3gbps drives are already going to be bottlenecked by any CPU quite often.

 

[pcchen]

They also don't have to be written/paid off in one week, quarter or even year.

Actually, it's very likely that they want to cover the cost in maybe one year. It's unlikely that Intel/Micron can keep this 25nm cost advantage for more than one year, so if they don't have any profit advantage with 25nm, why upgrade at all? They'd make more money by simply making more old chips, just like their competitors do.

So it's very unreasonable to assume that, since the cost is only half of the previous generation, the price should also be half of that. It may reach that point one year later, but not now.

 

[Grall]

Swaaye, I agree that games don't benefit (as much) as the OS itself, but there are side benefits, virus scanning my mechanical 2TB drive takes fricken forever for example despite there's only a little over 300GB of stuff on it.

 

[swaaye]

Virus scanning might end up very CPU limited on a SSD but I'm sure it would be faster. I'm not sure as I haven't done a full system scan in forever. Most of what I'd be worried about being virus ridden would be apps I install and these get wiped with every system rebuild and scanned upon download / reinstall anyway.

 

[Otto Dafe]

From observing price trends I've formed the impression that companies like to fleece early adopters to recoup their costs for a shrink ASAP. Only exceptions being if they're playing catch-up, or, at the other end of the spectrum, if they think they can take a huge amount of market share. I don't think either of those apply here, so hopefully we'll see the prices drop in 6-12 months after intel has had their pound of flesh.

 

[swaaye]

Well the 25nm flash hasn't reduced SSD pricing whatsoever yet. In fact with some drives you get less value than you did with 34nm because they've increased the redundancy partitioning so you get a few gigs less usable space.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Aye one problem with shrinking MLC (probably SLC also) is that the number of times you can write to a memory cell is reduced. So to keep drives at a similarly robust level as the previous node, you need more redundant chips for the wear leveling.

Until someone comes up with a solution to that problem, I expect to see more and more space on SSDs to be dedicated for this.

Regards,
SB

 

[dizietsma]

Well I just bought a Crucial Real SSD C300 considering the new 25nm Intel ones are not cheap. I can only use it off a 3GB SATA connector for the moment but that will only impact sequential read speeds to much degree.

It has the advantages of being 6GB able, fairly cheap, 34nm Micron NAND chips and around for a year or more so the bugs it had originally are likely gone now.

Hopefully it will impress with the speed.

 

[Grall]

It should impress. Resident program startup time when logging in for example was cut by a factor of ~20-30 or so when I went from mechanical to SSD...

Btw, don't expect to notice any performance increase whatsoever from switching to a 6gbit/s port. Unless you have two such drives both on 6giga ports and copy literally dozens of gigabytes between them you won't notice a thing.

 

[pcchen]

I still think using SSD as a gigantic harddisk cache is a better idea. Marvell have a solution for this and they claim something like 80% of using a SSD directly, but I haven't looked into it yet.

Currently I'm using a 80GB SSD as my system disk, and it's filling up really fast (the remaining space now is around 4GB). Readyboost is close but it still has many limitations, as it's basically designed to use USB sticks. If one use internal SSD for caching, a lot of headaches can be avoided, such as encryption (if someone managed to remove your internal SSD, he will be able to remove your system harddisk).

 

[RobertR1]

When I build a PC around nov, I'll be looking at the 250gb vertex drives. Hopefully they are proven reliable and come down in price by then.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Well I just bought a Crucial Real SSD C300 considering the new 25nm Intel ones are not cheap. I can only use it off a 3GB SATA connector for the moment but that will only impact sequential read speeds to much degree.

It has the advantages of being 6GB able, fairly cheap, 34nm Micron NAND chips and around for a year or more so the bugs it had originally are likely gone now.

Hopefully it will impress with the speed.

This is what I use in my main machine. You won't be disappointed. It loses to the Sandforce based drives when accessing files that can be heavily compressed, but pulls ahead with files that are not very compressable (game files, archives, movie files, jpgs, etc.).

It had a slightly noticeable bump in speed with the move from a 3G Intel controller to a 6G Intel controller. Most people that don't notice a speed increase compared it on a 3G Intel Controller compared to the Marvel 6G Controllers that were used on the socket 1156 boards. Those Marvel 6G controllers were often slower than the Intel 3G controllers. So basically if you don't have access to the new socket 1155 based Intel MBs, stick to the Intel 3G controller on older MBs. Not sure how things are with the AMD based boards.

Right now I'm looking to see how the Crucial C400 stacks up to the new generation of Sandforce drives. The new generation of SF drives are pretty impressive and the first that will noticeably blow away traditional HDD's in pretty much all useage scenarios except for mass storage. But then SSD's have at least 5+ years before they can challenge HDDs for the mass storage crown. And I wouldn't be surprised if it was still 10+ years before they could do that.

Regards,
SB

 

[Frank]

Aye one problem with shrinking MLC (probably SLC also) is that the number of times you can write to a memory cell is reduced. So to keep drives at a similarly robust level as the previous node, you need more redundant chips for the wear leveling.

Until someone comes up with a solution to that problem, I expect to see more and more space on SSDs to be dedicated for this.

Regards,
SB

Yes, that really bothers me as well. They have come down from 100,000+ write cycles to just 3,000 in a few years time (!!!). Not a good development, at all.

They have to multiply the amount of storage capacity (and keep most of it in reserve) to offer a lifetime that is on the low end of the order of magnitude of the old ones.

 

[dizietsma]

Thanks for everyones input.

I put the drive in and it works well, boot time went from over 3 minutes to 1 min 10 seconds so a lot faster. I did happen to completely blow my 1TB C drive up though during trying to fit it in the PC though, so that was a pain, another on order ... at least my backup drive with the C and D drive images on it did not die. New drive on order.

Using the desktop is a lot more snappy. Is it worthwhile putting games on it for load times or not?

 

[Grall]

Games, not so much. Not a lot of random seeks during level loads and such.

I'm sure putting games on the SSD will make them load faster, however it won't be the same level of increase as you see when booting up your rig. Just keep the page file on a different drive to your games and you'll be fine.

 

[MfA]

They have to multiply the amount of storage capacity (and keep most of it in reserve) to offer a lifetime that is on the low end of the order of magnitude of the old ones.

Depends on the usage pattern.

If it's for business use and it churns through TBs of data a week as temporary storage it's not going to last very long. If it's for home use where 99% of the data is essentially WORM you can get away with it for a long time. Although I'd prefer if there was say a couple of GB of SLC for the really frequently written stuff like the registry.