Intel's new mainstream SSD drive announced with benchmarks.

If you thought samsung ssd was really good and expensive then you should buy this new mainstream cost effective SSD from intel Intel X25-M 160gb SSD Drive (34nm) - 14th Aug 2009

The Intel SSD arrives in a plain box with the drive wrapped in foam and an antistatic bag. There is also a black and white 2 page printed installation leaflet and a sticker to confirm that you have wisely spent your money - does your SSD rock? Intels does!



The Intel drive is a Multi Level Cell (MLC) NAND drive with 10 Parallel Channel Architecture and a claimed sequential read of up to 250 MB/s and a claimed sequential write speed of up to 70mb/s. The Read Latency is 65 microseconds and the write latency is 85 microseconds.
When compared side by side with the previous 50nm version the new Intel X25-M is proposed to offer improved latency and faster random write Input/Output operations per second (IOPS). Intel also claim a 25 percent reduction in latency, meaning faster access to the data,. operating at 65 microsecond latency. When you compare this to the latency of 4,000 microseconds for a standard HDD, these are hugely superior. Random write performance is claimed to deliver 6,600 4kb write IOPS and up to 35,000 read IOPS.



The Controller is the Intel PC29AS21BA0 F0N2881.1 0907. Flash: Intel 29F16B08JAMDI 092217 (16GB Flash). Ram: Micron 48LC16M16A2 (32MB SDRAM).

Improvements to the write algorithm and the maintenance of a larger LBA remap table necessitated the move to a larger 32GB SDRAM chip. The flash is of sufficient density to keep the underside of the PCB free which will enable a painless transaction to a future 320GB model. For those interested - 16GB on a single flash chip is a huge improvement because Samsung has to place a pair of 8GB chips on each other to match this.

Alongside the controller we find Samsung DRAM but unlike other SSD's this memory is not used as a cache, for that the controller has 256kb on-die. The DRAM chip is actually used by the controller to decide on where to write data as part of the wear levelling and reliability algorithms. As well as offering these two features the X25-M is able to clean up its flash chips after periods of random writes to the drive. This ensures that future operations do not suffer from significant performance drops when the drive next tries to write to the flash chips. This is not ‘TRIM’ but it does give a similar effect in that it ensures the drives performance does not suffer from large drops in performance over time. Intel also plans to deliver a firmware update to allow support of the Windows 7 Trim command, along with an end user tool, to allow users to optimize the performance of their SSD on Windows XP and Vista operating systems. One of the benefits of Intel’s firmware and flash process is that data on the drive is maintained where as on some competitors’ products the drive is wiped by the flashing process.



The power consumption still remains at a miniscule 150mw under load and 75MW 'typical' - however we will have to take Intel at their word as we have no way to accurately measure such low drain figures. The Life Expectancy is claimed to be around 1.2 million hours before a failure and while this is a rather meaningless figure, we calculated if you had this drive turned on for 24 hours a day, you would get around 50,000 days of life from it ... or around 137 years. Unfortunately we don't really have the time (or life expectancy) to test that theory. It would be safe to say, that if properly cared for this drive should last a lifetime, or even a cryogenically enhanced one. Confusingly, In another PDF Intel state "The drive will have a minimum of 5 years of useful life under typical client workloads with up to 20 GB of host writes per day." It is hard to understand the exact way they measure life span however we can assume a life of 10 years or so would be possible without noticeable degradation under normal, moderate everyday use.

If all these figures just melt your brain, fret not, that is why we are here. We will thrash the Intel M25 M through not only the leading synthetic benchmarks, but we will ascertain if this drive will give you added performance in the real world.

 

http://www.driverheaven.net/reviews.php?reviewid=825&pageid=2

read the benchmarks and conclusion, easily beat samsung and also a new low price for consumer on ssd.

 

You should have put this in the ssd thread.

 

While Intel is faster than Samsung, it's also almost 2x the price per GB. Although I think Dell might have changed the price now, the Samsung 256GB was $480, while the Intel 160GB is at least $440.

 

This sounds promising!