News - Intel launches 34nm SSDs, promises lower prices and improved performance

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Intel's 34nm solid state drives are official, and they're both quicker and cheaper, too.

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Read more.

Wow, SSD announcements everywhere.

Those prices look considerably better then their current SSD pricing!! Glad this appeared as I have been umming and ahhing over those crucial babies.....

Guess it's a good reason to sit tight a couple of weeks and see what happens.

Want!

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Originally Posted by shaithis

Wow, SSD announcements everywhere.

Those prices look considerably better then their current SSD pricing!! Glad this appeared as I have been umming and ahhing over those crucial babies.....

Guess it's a good reason to sit tight a couple of weeks and see what happens.

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I wouldn't sit for too long or you are going to be sitting for years... I would imagine that SSDs are going to be rapidly improving in speed/capacity/price for at least the next year to year and a half.

Personally I have put my line in the sand at £100 for a 120+gb (big enough for my OS, games and apps) fast SSD, when that happens I will put my toe in the water (assuming I can still afford to buy one).... until then I am sitting on the sidelines watching the prices tumble whilst capacity slowly increases and the maximum speeds attainable have sort of increased depending on what benchmarks are important this week.

Oh and I will wait until W7 has hit the market and TRIM has had any bugs worked out, although i expect that to have happened before SSDs hit my price point.

We are edging closer to £1/GB woot! Seriously tempted by the 80gig for a system drive now.

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Originally Posted by funke_munke

We are edging closer to £1/GB woot! Seriously tempted by the 80gig for a system drive now.

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£1 per GB is what im waiting for then its time to go for some RAID 0 Action!

"far more palatable at $225 (£135)" When i read that i nearly did a Lonely Island in my undies. I'd personally say 80GB would be enough for an OS and a few games/apps, although thats coming from someone who uses a 120GB first gen Samsung SATA drive :P But seriously these prices are attractive to say the least, especially with the performance of the Intel drives and definite support for TRIM.

Well, they're getting there, but personally, they're still quite a long way off the point where I'll be buying.

Issue 1) - Price per GB. They need to be a LOT closer the the £/GB of hard drives before I'll shell out. Why? Because, for me, the performance benefit over hard drives doesn't come close to justifying the price. It will for some people, of course, either because the performnce is a real issue or just because they want the latest bells and whistles.

But even assuming that gets resolved, and it no doubt (eventually) will, we then come to :-

Issue 2) Longevity and durability. Frankly ....

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Intel states that random write performance has increased twofold, adding that the X25-M is capable of delivering up to 6,600 4KB write IOPS and up to 35,000 read IOPS.

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concerns me more than a bit.


So my conclusion ..... interesting, but not for me. Not yet.

What has a high random write performance got to do with longevity and durability?

Available for pre-order @ Scan already but still some way short of £/GB for the retail customer :(

80GB £183.77
160GB £355.53

Be interesting to see what happens to the prices of other manufacturers kit as a result.

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Originally Posted by Saracen

Issue 2) Longevity and durability. Frankly ....
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concerns me more than a bit.

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What is to be concerned about by the IOPS?

What i find intresting is the linear pricing. Given that with a good RAID controller 2 80gb would be better than 1 x 160. Enless of course they are betting on people been bottlenecked by low grade raid controllers.

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Originally Posted by kalniel

What has a high random write performance got to do with longevity and durability?

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Originally Posted by TheAnimus

What is to be concerned about by the IOPS?

What i find intresting is the linear pricing. Given that with a good RAID controller 2 80gb would be better than 1 x 160. Enless of course they are betting on people been bottlenecked by low grade raid controllers.

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I think he means that this will wear the drive out quicker.

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Originally Posted by Terbinator

I think he means that this will wear the drive out quicker.

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When you look at the MTBF they really don't wear out that fast.

yeah but SSD's get inherintly worse the more their used, so if its getting used lots the performance will eventually go/degrade. Besides whens MTBF ever stopped a drive form failing, people on here have talked about getting mutliple drives and having them all fail within a week/month.

Multiple SSD drives?

with flash wear you get write errors, most controllers can actually detect this automatically and try on another space. You would most likely suffer a big decline in performance, but still have data, plus the chances of loosing existing data are less.

I know which one i'd choose!

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Originally Posted by Terbinator

I think he means that this will wear the drive out quicker.

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Why would it? Unless it enabled you to do more work than you could before - the lifespan in terms of amount of work done is going to be at least as good. The fact that there's more time to do more work because they're faster shouldn't be anything against the drive - you could always lower your work rate down to match the older drives if you wanted them to save completing the work-lifespan until a particular time after purchase.