Intel's super fast SSD (X25-E)

[TheAnimus]

So yesterday and today i've been getting too grips with my latest toy.

http://www.kikatek.com/product_info....source=froogle

Bloody hell its fast. Its instantly incredibly bottlenecked by my intel south bridge SATA host, hopefully PCI-Express 16x RAID card will arrive tommorow.

Whats truely amazing about this bad boy is the way the speed doesn't taper off like most physical drives (ie the larger the file, the larger the fall off). I've been having strange issues thou with 'spikes' in my performance graph, but i think that might be more to do with the failings of my test machine. (Dual Xeon E5420) will be intresting to see what its like in a more powerful box next week.

But for comparison, its faster than a RAID-5 of 5 15k rpm scsi drives.... Wow.

The thing i'm most impressed about is the sustained write speeds, i'm actually getting 170mb, a graph in HD-tach is a bit spikey, but it is actually doing the quoted bench marks.

So a little bored i stopped using it for what its ment for, and started using it as the main OS drive for my PC...... F**K.

Its so damn fast, remeber the first time you when on an STOL jet? This is faster.

As soon as the 64GB comes out, i'm getting one for both my desktops. Assuming it costs no more than £500, its money much better spent than on massive RAM or stupidily fast CPU imo.

[Clunk]

£472?

Have you been at the cocktails?

I was hoping they would have been about half that and I might have had one, but at £472 it's a non starter.

[jackvdbuk]

alot of money for not that much, i mean it might be much faster but is it really worth the price they are at now?
you must be very very rich

[Funkstar]

I'd really love as SSD in my desptop, but I really can't justify the price yet!

[TheAnimus]

alot of money for not that much, i mean it might be much faster but is it really worth the price they are at now?
you must be very very rich

I have a business need for it at work. Basically the server i'm using can only support about 24gb of RAM, a couple of these bad boys however and I've not got a ceiling on my scalability, they scale almost LINEAR! (i'm so happy, this has solved a problem of my crappy code).

It would be interesting to see if for developing using Visual Studio VSTO + a bunch of WPF (very memory hungry) on my box. If i can get some time, i'll put it in my dual xeon 5140 box 3gb ram, and see if i find the system 'quicker' for developing than my dual 5420 with 4gb of faster ram.

I think it will actually make this older box (which would be about £400 quid cheaper fair to say.) my prefered box?

My point is people buy the extreamly expensive edition of CPUs all the time, but something like this has a terrific performance boost.

I mean VS2k8 opens in < 1 second.... wow. I can get a debugging version of Excel up with all my big started up code done in about 3 seconds more than it waits on the database. I'm really impatient, i hate waiting, and something like this suites me right down to the ground.

[Clunk]

I think where this kind of thing will also bring huge benefits is laptops, I can't wait to get my mits on one for mine

[TheAnimus]

Indeed, the price of these things will fall, we already see plenty of mid market SSDs < &#163;200.

Myself, i wouldn't jump on those (enless RAIDing) until the ones with these performances come out for my desktop.

For laptops, i was flabberghasted by how a collueges dell netbook thingie really flew through an app like Visual Studio which normally takes a long while to come up.

We're at abit of a bottleneck in CPU developement land right now, they are just going to parralise out, which means we don't see much benefit because the lazy programmers have to learn how to use all the cores first.

an SSD like this, whilst &#163;500 will show an INSTANT performance boost doing most peoples tasks! (no more having to put your browser cache in RAM etc).

[format]

What's it cost for the cheapest SSD? One that I could just wap Vista on if I wanted.

[this_is_gav]

Cheapest means you're looking at an MLC drive. And for an MLC drive to work well, you'll currently need a hardware RAID controller with cache. So it's nowhere near cheap after all.

I was tempted a month back, but I'll wait. They really are the big step forward though. The hard drive is the thing you're waiting on most in your PC, so if you're looking for a generally large step forward, they are the way to go.