New Intel SSDs

[Husar]

Intel has released some new MLC-based SSDs lately and they seem to be pretty good, especially compared to other MLC-based SSDs, unfortunately they do seem a bit pricey and I couldn't find them in stores here yet.

AnandTech review

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.

Within the next five years we'll be in a situation where the fans in your system are more likely to fail than your hard drive, and if your drive does happen to fail it'll tell you well in advance. How nice of it.

What Intel did with the X25-M is show the world what is possible with MLC flash. You get better than SLC performance, at lower than SLC prices. Despite that, the absolute only thing that bothers me about Intel's X25-M is the price. Although Intel is totally justified in pricing the X25-M at $595, I was hoping for pricing inline with the JMicron based MLC SSDs. At $300 - $400 this would be a no brainer for any enthusiast, and honestly even at $595 it's worth considering if you have other drives for data storage.

This last quote seems to hit the nail on the head, although if you look at the whole article you will see that gaming performance is not affected too much in comparison to normal HDDs but if the pricing of this thing will fall the temptation to get one, or two, or even three will grow, seems Intel showed everyone how to make a real SSD and that MLC-based SSDs don't have to be bad.

[Mouzafphaerre]

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The only seeming disadvantage, in a manner of speaking, of these babies compared to classical hard drives is that they can't be used as backup storage media. But I'm sure a neat solution to that is already up the tech wizards' sleeves.
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[Whacker]

I think we were talking about this in the chat a few days ago. My take on SSD technology is that it's relatively new, but definitely promising. I've learned over the years that unless you've got a disposable income and the desire to be cutting edge, avoid being an early adopter. Prices are decidedly expensive for these dealies, and they will eventually die after a few years. On the positive side, two things that are VERY impressive are the significantly lower power consumption, and zero noise.

Generally speaking on SSD,s I'd like to see two things; better access times and throughput rates, and longer lifespan. Being solid state, I'd expect these to have better performance than what I'm currently seeing. Don't get me wrong, they're impressive, but I'd still expect more for what they are and the prices being charged. Second, the overall usable lifespan needs to be much improved. I've got HDD's that are 12+ years old that saw heavy use, and still run like champs, however it's a given that an SSD drive will eventually fail as there are only so many read/write cycles Things like background defragmenting processes can also lower the lifespan of these drives for those who aren't technically inclined or have the background knowledge.

Here's to hoping that we see some improvements by the time I my next upgrade cycle comes around next year.

[Husar]

What made me wonder is that defragmenting stuff. By the way the article describes it the controller of the HDD chooses where to put the data and the controller is the "interface" between the actual data and the operating system/mainboard/whatever so either the controller could tell the system that the data is nicely clustered together or the defrag process would simply end up with a still fragmented HDD because due to the wear-leveling algorithms that Intel applied the controller will never put all the data into the same corner of the SSD as some defrag program would require. I wonder how that works out in practice?