Intel X25-M SSD: Intel Delivers One of the World's Fastest Drives
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 8, 2008 4:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Storage
The Generic SSD
Intel isn't the first manufacturer to get into the SSD market, in fact quite a few of the companies we regularly deal with have SSDs. OCZ Technology, SuperTalent, Patriot, G.Skill, Mtron, and Silicon Power are just the names that contributed hardware for this review, but many more actually make SSDs.
Silicon Power drives provided by DV Nation
You'll notice that most of these companies are memory companies, not chip companies. Cracking open any of their SSDs reveals the true nature of their SSD manufacturing business: most of them simply rebrand someone else's SSD.
Let's take the MLC drives for example, here we have MLC drives from OCZ (the infamous Core), SuperTalent and Silicon Power:
Every last one of the drives has the exact same layout, same flash devices and same Jmicron controller (the JMF602).
The same is true for SLC designs, here we have SLC SSDs from G.Skill and OCZ:
They are the same, you could give them ice crea...nevermind
Note that these are the same drive, in this case purchased from Samsung and placed in new housing.
Only Mtron offers a slight amount of innovation by using its own FPGA as a controller:
But we know very little about any of these controllers so it's tough to say if Mtron's FPGA is done well.
For the most part however, all existing MLC drives on the market are built out of the same parts, as are all existing SLC drives. The MLC drives all use the JMF602 and the SLC drives use the Samsung S3C49RBX01 host controller with 32MB of on-board DRAM. The SLC drives are all priced above $640 for 64GB while the MLC drives are all under $300 for 64GB, Intel's 80GB MLC is priced in between the two (but closer to the SLC drives) at $595.
We'll soon see that Intel's price is justified in the market, but before doing that it's important to address an issue with these very tempting MLC drives...
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aeternitas - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
I dont know where you shop, but 100$ can get you 750GB.It doesnt make much of a point anyway, as flash based and typical hard drives will coexist for at least the next ten years. One for preformance, the other for storage.
Maybe some of you are too young to remember, but it was only about 10 years ago that a 20GB hard drive cost 200$ at costco. We are a huge step in terms of the new technology from where we were before. 32 GB for 100$? Yes please. In ten years i expect to see 3+TB flash drives running over 1GBps throughput for around 200$.
strikeback03 - Thursday, September 11, 2008 - link
I assume they were referring to 2.5 inch drives, as those prices are more in line with what was stated.Also don't forget that with the drop in $/GB of drives has come an increase in demand for storage. Ten years ago digital photography was almost non-existent, with file sizes topping out under a megabyte. Images on the web were maybe 640x480. Now we have digital cameras that average 4-6MB as JPEGs, and some can turn out images over 30MB, not counting the medium-format backs (over 100MB IIRC for the 65Megapixel Phase 1). When I was in college any movie you saw on the network was sized to fit a 700MB CD, Now HD movies can range well over that. MP3s are still the same, or you can store in a lossless format if you choose.
Will 3TB be small in 10 years? Possibly. The key for flash completely replacing mechanical will be getting the price low enough to hold large amounts of the current data.
aeternitas - Saturday, September 13, 2008 - link
Even if they were useing 2.5" drives in the example, it doesnt matter. The fact that these drives will be replaceing 3.5" ones makes their point just as misguided in the point they were trying to make.Laptop and desktop drives were differant due to size, now they arnt, so you cant comapair them (HDD vs SSD) in such a illogical manner.
Blimeynext - Friday, April 23, 2010 - link
"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."Any tool out there which tells me how much I write to my HDD each day? It would be nice to find out my present usage and compare it with the 100 GB/day limit....
If I write less than 20GB a day does that mean the SSD will last at least 25 years?
Smokerz - Sunday, January 2, 2011 - link
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/apple/2010/07/01/...read it all
Smokerz - Sunday, January 2, 2011 - link
sorry for the misspell