News - Intel 'Emcrest' SSDs with 450MB/s read speeds to land next month?

[HEXUS]

34nm drives deliver 300MB/s writes and SATA 6Gbps support.

Read more.

[Hicks12]

Im not sure if im happy or a bit dissapointed... 60-80gb is fine for me and im looking for a new SSD but was waiting for the new intel/sandforce and micron drives, if any of them went for £1/gb then id buy it right now. Intels 25nm drives were being said to double the capacity and increase the speeds modestly without affecting price... so that would have meant they were under 1/gb or darn close. I dont want huge burst speeds i just want the SSD advantages like the minimal access time, 150mb/s+ is good enough... maybe ill just have to look at the alternatives if these are going for the high end pricing .

[LuckyNV]

Hopefully older models will drop in price? I don't care for higher throughput or anything else actually, personally I think the Intel SSDs have reached a certain sufficient performance level and now we (I) just need higher capacity for cheaper.

That or Steam needs to have a facility that I can offload certain games to other physical HDDs :/

My old Samsung SSDs pale in comparison to current SSDs but even then there is a large noticeable difference after moving them to either my 640GB WD blue or Samsung F1 1TB (texture/world loading, map loading, reduced stutters etc...)

[Noli]

That or Steam needs to have a facility that I can offload certain games to other physical HDDs :/

Well you're right in that you can't choose and pick 'certain' games to be offloaded to other physical HDDs but you can choose for *all* of them to be quite easily. All my steam games are on a separate raptor drive - I would love them to be on my main system SSD but like most people couldn't afford one big enough... (but no biggie if they take a little bit longer to load from a mechanical drive - my game playing time ain't *that* precious)

[ehhhhhhh]

That or Steam needs to have a facility that I can offload certain games to other physical HDDs :/

If I need space for a new game on my SSD, I backup the games I want to the HDD. If I need a game again it can be restored in matter of minutes with all the saves.

[Sousuke]

Main question is the price.

I already have a 150GB WD VelociRaptor as my main HDD and considering going SSD now.

I don't play too many games. so even with Win7 and my necessary apps; I still got COD MW2, Black OPS, Battlefield BC2, StarCarft 2, NFS Hot Pursuit and Combat Arms in it with 30 GB remaining.

I paid £105 for my VelociRaptor. If the Intel had the drive at £190 for 150 GB which for me seem to be the sweet spot I'm sold.

[LuckyNV]

If I need space for a new game on my SSD, I backup the games I want to the HDD. If I need a game again it can be restored in matter of minutes with all the saves.

TBH it would be very easy for Valve to implement this feature.

I used to do what you suggested, but some games are truly massive, you're looking at 8GB for Civ V and 11GB? for X3 Terran conflict...

After a while it just becomes extremely tedious.

There is actually a way using a feature built into Windows, not yet tried it out, but its still not a great method.

[sam3]

Game save manager has a easy to use tool which allows you to span steam games over different drives (which is good for putting your favourite games on your ssd and having the rest saved elsewhere).

[Acute]

Just bought a 60gb corsair F60. its fast but am worried about the life expectancy thing with ssd's.

How long will they actually last?

[crossy]

Just bought a 60gb corsair F60. its fast but am worried about the life expectancy thing with ssd's.

How long will they actually last?

I had the same question when I was considering whether to go SSD for boot drive on my new PC build, or stay with good ole HDD (especially as the local PC World were doing a half-price sale on the 300GB WD Raptor).

Basically the consensus seems to be that - providing you don't mistreat it - you'll get between 5 and 7 years of life from a typical "consumer" SSD. "Mistreatment" includes dropping it, using it as a soldering iron stand, or running defrag software on it - especially the latter. Comments like "you'll find it'll be obsoleted before you wear it out" were typical ...

Or you could be cynical and say that given Corsair and OCZ both offer three year warranties, that their devices are going to last for four years or more. If you want to think yourself into a migraine then I'd suggest looking at http://www.wdc.com/WDProducts/SSD/wh...ution_0812.pdf where there's a nice formula you can use to work out an estimate, although they claim 7-8 years as typical.

Eventually I decided, (following advice received from Hexus folks), to buy an OCZ Vertex and just make sure that Win7 backs it up weekly to a "real" drive. Although interestingly enough, OCZ quote the Vertex2 as 2Mhr MTBF whereas Corsair only say half that for the F60. Don't forget these are mean time between failures - so your slice of SSD-loveliness may go for years, or fail tomorrow. That said, you'd have to be very unlucky to get a bad one surely (being solid state I would assume that manufacturers QA would filter out a unit that was that defective).

[Noli]

Game save manager has a easy to use tool which allows you to span steam games over different drives (which is good for putting your favourite games on your ssd and having the rest saved elsewhere).

Thanks for this - awesome free program! Also love the fact that it can save games to your dropbox account with symbolic links to that folder so all your save games can be in the cloud. Very smart...