intel entering mainstream SSD market

[WiCKeD]

The Register has discovered intel has plans to enter the solid-state disk market. One of the barriers to bringing SSD to the masses has been price and intel's entry could step-up the competition and technology, ideally bringing us blazingly fast load times in the near future...

Intel will ramp up its solid-state drive operation next quarter with the introduction of a range of notebook-oriented units running to 160GB of storage capacity.

According to Troy Winslow, Intel's NAND Products Group Marketing Manager, interviewed by News.com, Q2 will see the chip giant roll-out 1.8in and 2.5in SSDs with capacities ranging from 80GB to 160GB.

[lexandro]

Oh good show Intel. With the money they have backing them up it shoudnt be long till parts start flowing and the prices start to drop. Its about time one of the "big guns" started this.

[Martin Logan]

Couldnt this also add to the lifespan of computer because it eliminates the usage of moving parts ?
Anyway am looking forward to better loading times

[ValueSize]

Originally Posted by Martin Logan

Couldnt this also add to the lifespan of computer because it eliminates the usage of moving parts ?
Anyway am looking forward to better loading times

SSD has a lifespan too though. ~100,000 writes to EACH cell seems to be the industry estimate. So a much longer MTBF if you assume nothing else will die easily but they will still have their share of failures.

I just did a google so here is a random blog that had the same quote on 100,000 I just mentioned:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Apple/?p=1342

[MrObvious]

I think this is nice. I might get one if possible.

[Martin Logan]

100,000 writes to each cell sounds like an awsome amount indeed.
As I said hope to see some of these thingys on the market soon

[Camride]

I've love to have two of those 160gb's in a RAID 0 for my OS drive. Hopefully they help drive the prices down quickly and push the industry ahead with improving small file read/write times.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Originally Posted by Martin Logan

100,000 writes to each cell sounds like an awsome amount indeed.
As I said hope to see some of these thingys on the market soon

It isn't that awesome, it's the same write cycle that's on current USB thumbdrives, and you know those fail in a couple years if used heavily.

[ValueSize]

Originally Posted by Th3_uN1Qu3

It isn't that awesome, it's the same write cycle that's on current USB thumbdrives, and you know those fail in a couple years if used heavily.

And current USB flashdrives are also 2-16GB which != 160GB meaning that each cell gets written to exponentially more times and thus fail way faster.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Originally Posted by ValueSize

And current USB flashdrives are also 2-16GB which != 160GB meaning that each cell gets written to exponentially more times and thus fail way faster.

Well, good point there. Anyway, upgrade is the way, right? But they should develop a SMART-like system for them (if they don't have it already), so that we don't find our data slowly disappearing off the drive.

Heh, in any way, i'll still have my 400 meg Maxtor HDD when all SSDs run out.

[Camride]

Originally Posted by Th3_uN1Qu3

But they should develop a SMART-like system for them (if they don't have it already), so that we don't find our data slowly disappearing off the drive.

They already do that IIRC. When a block starts to reach the end of it's life cycle it gets marked and doesn't get used anymore. So you wouldn't slowly lose data, just space.

[deadpass]

Originally Posted by Camride

They already do that IIRC. When a block starts to reach the end of it's life cycle it gets marked and doesn't get used anymore. So you wouldn't slowly lose data, just space.

yep that's how it works, that's how you can tell that your drive is dying, the space just keeps getting smaller.

[afrakes]

And with modern wear-leveling algorithms the durability of SSDs is supposed to be pretty good. MTron claims >140 years @ 50GB write per day for their drives.

[Martin Logan]

Good to finaly now why some of my usb drives seem to be one or two MB smaler then they should be.
So what is the normal maximum for writing to cells on the current hard drives then ? More than 100.000 I supose ?

[Beari78]

Solid state hdisks would eliminate the need for defrag no? and raid0 since the load time would be so very fast?

[MrObvious]

Originally Posted by Beari78

Solid state hdisks would eliminate the need for defrag no? and raid0 since the load time would be so very fast?

Wrong. Defragging refers to the data itself, not the method of data stored.

Let me put it this way...if you had an excel spreadsheet and a filing cabinet, which would be faster to make changes and save things? Now say you needed to organize files alphabetically. You still need to do it...whether it's on Excel or a bunch of folders in a filing cabinet. The only difference is you can select the cells you want to organize and Excel will organize it in not even an second. Manually doing it in a filing cabinet takes forever.

I hope that analogy helps clear it up.

[Beari78]

I'm sorry but that analogy does not compute. (it doesn't really refer to fragmentation of a hd.) A better analogy would be like... Think of 2 identical books. Remove all pages from 1 and mix about, leave other alone. Now try to read both in numrical page order. Fragmented takes longer.

I was hoping that a SDD would view all info all of the time, like ram.

so sdd does not = ram (meaning random access mem) I thought since there was no moving parts data could be stored in a fragmented way and it wouldn't affect access time. as lonng as it was indexed at any rate.

Pickin up what I'm puttin down?

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

SSDs will NEVER be as fast as RAM, as they're based on flash memory, which still sucks balls at writing small files.

And as everything in the OS and the internet is divided into a gazillion tiny files, defragging one of those isn't going to be pretty, especially when the defrag hits windows system folder or the browser cache. And yes, they'll need defragging. Which will shorten the drive's lifespan by a lot.

[spin54]

Aren't laptops with ssd drives failing left and right lately? I can't see this as a smart move right now.

[Martin Logan]

Maybe it would be a good idea to use external sata for ssd harddrives.
It would kinda be like using you`re old card reader but faster and it would allow for reliabilty testing by real life users.
Or maybe this development is just ahead of its time