Intel Larsen Creek SSDs

Intel's Larsen Creek SSDs leak out, courtesy of ASRock's Z68 motherboard -- Engadget

 

sounds like a rehash of the readydrive(?) thingy. Or another way of doing what Momentus XT does.

 

This sounds like SSD's done right.

We'll get their all their strengths and none of their potential weaknesses and for (hopefully) a much better performance increase to cost ratio than any SSD can possibly offer now.

When will this be available for the notebooks?

(And I want the SSD capacity to be at least 100GB - to match my default install 'C:' drive size).

 

A 750GB Momentus XT with 8GB cache would solve the problem too.

 

I'm thinking of upgrading when Ivy Bridge comes along, with the SSD caching chipset as well. I'll probably use a 128-160gb SSD with part of it partitioned as a cache and the rest of it as an OS drive, so the entire Windows install will be located on the SSD.

 

*Drool*

The 4GB already makes such a big difference. I'd love to see 8GB on here. I think that would really be the sweet spot for price/performance with these drives.

 

Nope. What I love about SSD is firstly them being silent. No noise at all, zip, nada, zero overbar dB.
I could live without their performance, but not without their noiselessness.

 

we get all the strengts of the ssd minus all the weaknesses of a hdd, together with all the strengths of a hdd minus all the weaknesses of an ssd (okay there's only the additional cost as a weakness here).

we lose silence, we lose overall speed and performance, we lose ruggedness. so we lose about all that an ssd brings.

but for those that can't put ssds to good use like you, it might be awesome. nothing for me, though.

 

So Anandtech did a review today of the mobo chipset and specifically the Smart Response Technology that this SSD is built for. It actually doesn't look that bad at all. What caught my eye was that it states that there are two mobile chipsets that support this tech, HM67 and QM67. My incoming Alienware M14x happens to have a HM67 chipset! I know there are a couple people on this board who have done the SSD + HDD combo to their M14x systems. Has anyone looked into this yet? It might be worth buying a much more affordable ~64GB drive and make the whole SSD the cache maxing it out. I'd really like to know if it's been done already and what the experience was like.

AnandTech - Intel Z68 Chipset & Smart Response Technology (SSD Caching) Review

 

So you are saying to me that you have a ivy bridge chipset?

 

If it is compared to a hdd, good improvement. compared to a ssd, not so much. Huge difference to me in performance between any hdd, including xt.

 

obviously this is worse than an ssd, and better than a hdd. what else did we expect? magic?

 

As long as I have a spinning platter somewhere in my computer, nobody can convince me about the advantage of it.

SSD all the way.


--

 

indeed. back is the noise. back is the heat. back is the instability on external forces.

but for those who DO have a hdd, it's a nice addon.

 

The only advantage I see is having 2 terabytes of storage at your disposal for $80.

 

this is more for a desktop oriented usage a two drive configuration is not the norm for notebook. And for that usage, it sounds nice as the chances of TB storage is higher and noise, heat vibration is not much of a concern(as they are already there).

well, just another way of what phil said.

 

indeed. would've been a nice setup for my home server. then again, the old mtron serves it well, too.

it's definitely a big plus for any system that would only have a hdd else. for 100$, quite the difference.

but in laptops, i prefer pure solid state. ruggedness has gotten rather important to me. it reduces the need to always take extra care of those devices.

 

agreed 100%. SSD is really made for notebook/tablet especially now we have reasonably priced 128-160GB version, fits at least 70% of the notebook category. Unfortunately, people always get scared by the lost of GB(say 500/750GB) when it usually is not needed.

 

Eh.

I'm more a fan of using a NAS for bulk storage. That way you can do things like use ZFS, have multiple computers share the storage, etc.

Speaking of which, ZFS has had this functionality at the software level for ages now! It's superior to this in pretty much every way:

1) It's not restricted to a single cache drive. You can use as many as you want, and the performance boost just keeps scaling up.

2) Write caching (ZIL) and read caching (L2ARC) are separate so you can use the drives best suited for each (i.e. fast MLC for L2ARC, reliable SLC for ZIL)

3) Best of all, you can do it with any hardware supported by FreeBSD (as opposed to one or two specific chipsets supported by a very few manufacturers.)

I guess it's good that this is coming to Windows desktops, but it still seems pretty limited considering...

 

this thing cannot be compared with ZFS though ZFS is an overkill for most home situation. And NAS would be network bandwidth limited and this is more about a per desktop enhancement, XT in steroid.

 

Reading the article again, and talking it over with another forum poster after showing him the article, I think this is probably a bad idea for notebooks. I forgot about the extra heat introduced when running both drives at the same time. The laptop would need to be designed for it and allow enough heat dissipation. The M14x would have the SSD and HDD stacked one on top of the other. That's way too much heat concentrated in one location that I'm comfortable with. Don't really care about ruggedness as I don't think I'll ever have a situation where I'll be running the laptop while moving. I do however think that this would be killer in a desktop PC. Stick in a fast 64GB SSD and make it run in that caching mode. I think it would really cut down on loading times for games. I will defiantly be looking at this when I build a new PC in the winter.