Intel Announces New 320 SSD Series

[lamorpa]

[citation][nom]someonewhoknowsalittle[/nom]...We need to find a storage medium that is both fast and reliable over millions of writes, rewrites and reads.[/citation]
It's called a hard disk. Almost all computers use them.

[citation][nom]someonewhoknowsalittle[/nom]SSD with only a few thousand rewrites possible before serious degradation is a flawed storage medium.[/citation]
What you describe would be true, except that the typical range today for flash SSDs is 1 to 5 million.

[citation][nom]someonewhoknowsalittle[/nom]Why spend over $1000 for such a flawed unit that won't survive more than 1 year if used to store data?[/citation]
For the near zero seek time and read rate. How did you miss that? (Also, the one year life is incorrect when used in the intended manner)

 

[someonewhoknowsalittle]

@lamorpa:
"It's called a hard disk. Almost all computers use them."

Very funny. You know I meant something faster than a conventional rotating platter hard disk.

"What you describe would be true, except that the typical range today for flash SSDs is 1 to 5 million."

You are wrong about that. What you say is actually untrue for this Intel new 320 SSD series drive. Look up the way that SSD's write and erase cells. If your data is being re-written on a ssd, the ssd must go through an erase cycle. SLC flash can do a maximum of 100,000 write/erase cycles and MLC 10,000. The next shrink of MLC will do just 3,000 write/erase cycles, as a consequence of the process geometry down-sizing. And this new Intel 320 SSD series drive is a MLC drive, not a SLC drive, so it will be limited to approx. 10,000 write/erase cycles. That is why people who understand how MLC SSD drives work, use them only as boot drives. And that's why a 600 GB boot drive is overkill (not needed) for most users.

http://futuresource.trackandmonitormedia.com/?tag=ramsan

"For the near zero seek time and read rate. How did you miss that? (Also, the one year life is incorrect when used in the intended manner)"

Don't be a smart aleck. Everyone knows about the near zero seek time and read rate. And I already mentioned that for a MLC SSD, the only "correct" way to use it that will allow it to last more than a year or two is to use it only for your OS(es) and your programs which don't have to go through erase cycles, unlike data which has to be rewritten that requires the cells of the SSD to be erased.

 

[lamorpa]

[citation][nom]someonewhoknowsalittle[/nom]...[/citation]
A medium with the speed of an SSD and the capacity, price, and rewrite capabilities of a HD is a good idea, albeit a perfectly obvious one. Besides, my name's not Aleck.

 

[someonewhoknowsalittle]

[citation][nom]lamorpa[/nom]A medium with the speed of an SSD and the capacity, price, and rewrite capabilities of a HD is a good idea, albeit a perfectly obvious one. Besides, my name's not Aleck.[/citation]

Yes, lamorpa. Thank you for acknowledging that the idea I stated is a good one. Yes, it's an obvious one. I just don't want people to waste money on this particular Intel solution if it's not in their best interests. Obviously, this 320 series MLC SSD by Intel is not the solution most of us are looking for.

I know your name is not Aleck, that's why I wrote "@lamorpa". I said: "Don't be a smart aleck." I was going to use a stronger word than "aleck" but I thought better of it.

This SSD isn't the "droid" we're looking for. Most of us will just move along, especially for laptops. This 320 series Intel SSD does not make much sense for most of us with only space for 1 laptop hard drive to replace our current one with a MLC SSD that will last only 10,000 erase cycles at the most, and the SLC SSD's are still too small and too expensive for most of us to be useful and affordable.

 

[lamorpa]

@someonewhoknowsalittle: I certainly looks like a case of, 'Here's what we've (Intel) got."

 

[someonewhoknowsalittle]

[citation][nom]lamorpa[/nom]@someonewhoknowsalittle: I certainly looks like a case of, 'Here's what we've (Intel) got."[/citation]

Yes, I agree with you. It's a small step forward for those people who need that big of a fast, reasonably affordable boot drive SSD. 600 GB can store a lot of games, I guess.

 

[Guest]

@someonewhoknowsalittle (but who doesn't properly apply that knowledge): People don't buy additional traditional-storage data drives in order to shunt their heavy read-write activity to a non-SSD. They do it to store their data, in order to take advantage of the better size to cost ratio of the platter technology, since the larger data file types such as video, picture, and audio files gain no particular benefit from the greater read speeds and seek times of SSDs. The primary benefit from SSDs is gained when they're used for operating system, application, and most particularly temporary and swap files; files that are accessed often and that hold up continued activity when they can't be quickly accessed.

Data files don't create the primary wear on SSDs. Compared to most files, they just sit there waiting to be read, and might get overwritten from time to time if (and that's a big "if" for most users) their user is into content creation. Even in cases of data files that do often get overwritten (video or picture editing, for instance), the application, temporary, and swap files involved in that content creation get written and overwritten much more. In the vast majority of cases, "storage drives" are used for just that; to "store" the downloaded and ripped movies and music the user has collected, and are rarely ever overwritten at all.

While platter storage is quickly nearing its limits, the current SSD techology is still nearly in its infancy. It's going to advance, and the wear issues are going to be one of the areas in which it does so. But like most technology, the more it's tested, the faster the shortcomings are fixed, so we get to be the guinea pigs that help the future users. Someone had to do the same to get us to where we are, after all...

 

[someonewhoknowsalittle]

@quigonkenny: Please don't try to change my name. That's not nice, accurate or funny. If you want to make personal attacks, don't do it in this forum.

I never said that people don't buy traditonal large hard drives to store their large amounts of GBs of data files. Where did you get that from? And why are you repeating what I already said such as in "SSDs' primary benefit is for operating systems and applications? Obviously, that includes temp and swap files.You're not mentioning anything new here or anything that wasn't implicit in what I said.

And I never said that data files create the primary wear on SSDs. I said the rewriting and erasing of data files can create a lot of wear.
You say that "current SSD techology (sic) is...going to advance." Yes, but that is also problematic in part. The article I cited above states: "The next shrink of MLC will do just 3,000 write/erase cycles, as a consequence of the process geometry down-sizing" as opposed to the 10,000 write/erase cycles of the current generation of MLC. That constitutes a tremendous problem if nothing else is done to counteract the cutting of the SSDs' erase cycle lifetime to 1/3 of what it is now.

That's why I'm saying that a type of technology altogether different from SSD drives might be needed to get around the built-in degradation of the cells in SSDs caused by erase cycles. A storage medium that can only be erased a few thousand times now is not a good choice because the only way the SSD makers have of increasing a SSD's capacity is to keep doing die shrinks of the cells and that will cause the cells to degrade even faster with every erase cycle.

It reminds me of the brain in the robot Daneel Olivaw of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series of books. As the newer versions of his brain become more complex and store quantum multiple more of information/data than the original or earlier brain versions, those brains become more frail and unstable and last a much shorter period of time before they degenerate to the point that they are no longer reliable or effective. Asimov foresaw this storage problem in computing. Maybe, many did.