Intel 320 SSD aka G3

[Ao1]

I believe 4k 64 is highly weighted in the final score, but even taking that into account the G3 is a huge disappointment, especially on the pricing. Mainstream mediocre performance at an enthusiast price = (epic) fail.

Here is to hoping that G2 prices drop quite a bit so I can justify snapping a few up. Doubt it though. A lot of UK retailers still have G1’s that are priced higher than G2’s.

[Anvil]

Reviewed at tomshardware along with the m4

[czesiu]

pcper.com
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=1102

anandtech
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4244/intel-ssd-320-review

[Anvil]

And another one of the 300GB at StorageReview

and TechReport

and TheSSDReview

and Legitreviews

All in all its fairly good for an 3Gb/s drive. (based on the reviews I've read, so far)

[johnw]

the G3 is a huge disappointment, especially on the pricing. Mainstream mediocre performance at an enthusiast price = (epic) fail.

I disagree. Certainly the 320 is not a top performer, but it is not meant to be. The performance is "good enough" for most users (granted, xtremesystems is not "most users"). The prices are pretty good. It looks like the 160GB 320 will be the sweet spot for the 320 series, and it will probably sell for about $300, which is nice compared to nearly $400 for the X25-M 160GB.

For me, the selling points for the 320 are these:

* Intel reliability -- well under 1% annual failure rate

* data protection -- XOR / RAID-4-like redundancy

* power-loss protection with on-board capacitors

* low power usage

* SSD toolbox program

For any desktop system that does not have a Sandybridge motherboard (i.e., a good 6Gbps SATA controller), I think the Intel 320 series will be more than satisfactory for most users, and most importantly, it will be likely to be trouble-free and easy to use.

But, of course, it is not for xtreme users. They will probably want a Sandforce 2XXX.

[icecpu]

So when I will be able to buy them at retailer. I want to get one but there are no sign when they are available to order

[alfaunits]

I disagree. Certainly the 320 is not a top performer, but it is not meant to be. The performance is "good enough" for most users (granted, xtremesystems is not "most users").
For me, the selling points for the 320 are these:

* Intel reliability -- well under 1% annual failure rate
* data protection -- XOR / RAID-4-like redundancy
* power-loss protection with on-board capacitors
* low power usage
* SSD toolbox program

A non-XS user won't know what the above things mean or that it has them
IMO, for XS-ers only reliability might be of interest here. Speeds are not on par, the drive is in its own bracket - neither slow as the old G2, neither fast as even old SSDs, much less as new ones.
Unless the price is extremely lower than the rest, I don't see it as a viable buying option.
It's not that we need >G3 speeds, but if we can have them, with the same capacity and same price, realiability won't make me bite.
Just my 2cents - or 20cents, the inflation since the invention of the term prolly made it higher

[Ao1]

I disagree......

I don’t disagree with the selling points, just the price. Another gripe is that (according to Anandtech) “apparently the G2 controller had a number of features on-die, but not implemented in firmware.” So just like TRIM not being provided on G1 drives we now find out that encryption and NAND redundancy features were not switched on in the G2 drives. (And will remain switched off).

[johnw]

A non-XS user won't know what the above things mean or that it has them

Of course, as it should be. Most users will just know that the Intel 320 just works. Reliably. Trouble-free. Fast. And does not lose their data.

[johnw]

I don’t disagree with the selling points, just the price. Another gripe is that (according to Anandtech) “apparently the G2 controller had a number of features on-die, but not implemented in firmware.” So just like TRIM not being provided on G1 drives we now find out that encryption and NAND redundancy features were not switched on in the G2 drives. (And will remain switched off).

How can you disagree with a price? No matter what something costs, everyone wants it to cost less. But that is not a disagreement with price, that is just human nature.

As for not adding features to the G1 or G2, that seems reasonable. Sure, it would be nice if Intel did that, but Intel is not in the business of nice, they are in business for profits. And there is little profit in spending their engineering resources changing and testing old products, when they can instead use the resources on developing new products.

[Ao1]

The promise of 25nm was lower costs. A mainstream product is not a mainstream product if it is sold at an enthusiast price level. $1.1K for a 600GB drive puts it in perspective. It’s more expensive than a decent laptop/ pc.

As for features being disabled imagine if a car manufacturer had seat belts in a car but hide them from view, only to reveal them on a refresh of the model. The potential to lose data that could have been protected is a fair analogy to that scenario.

Intel won’t be making any profits from me on the G3.

EDIT and the point is that Intel engineers had already spent the time in developing features (most likely there from G1) that they intentionally held back for future "upgrades".

[johnw]

The promise of 25nm was lower costs.

...

EDIT and the point is that Intel engineers had already spent the time in developing features (most likely there from G1) that they intentionally held back for future "upgrades".

What promise? I saw no particular price given by Intel until today, and I certainly saw no promise from Intel. The 25nm flash has been hyped (by others) as being less expensive, and indeed, the 320 series SSDs are being introduced at a price signficantly lower than the price that the X25-M G2s were introduced at.

As for your claim that Intel intentionally held back features, I think you are mistaken. More likely is that Intel was planning ahead and included hooks for future features, but did not take the time to fully develop and test the features until a later generation. It is highly unlikely that it is as simple as changing a line of code to enable the feature. And I think you greatly underestimate the amount of testing and QA procedures that are required by Intel policy even when making small changes to products. Those sorts of policies are partly responsible for Intel's reliability.

I'm probably going to be getting several 160GB Intel 320 SSDs for myself. $300 for a 160GB SSD is a good price, and I like to have reliable products that just work.

[Ao1]

The push for 25nm by IMFT was based on lower costs and higher capacity. Both Intel and Micron have stated this publically and it was the sole objective of the investment in 25nm technology.

NAND is a multi billion industry. Granted most of that NAND does not end up in SSD's, but if there are not economies in scale now when will there be?

If you are developing features on-die it is unlikely that you would embed them without fully engineering them first, especially if your road map planned to use the features in future releases. I'm not knowledgeable about such things, but it would seem unlikely that you would embedded a technology unless you knew it would work.

[johnw]

The 320 SSDs are cheaper than the 34nm X25-M SSDs. Maybe not as much as you would like, but they are cheaper. As for your question about economies of scale, I'm not sure what you are thinking. Typically, that term refers to savings from large-scale production, i.e., manufacturing a huge amount of something. So you might expect the price of flash memory to decrease as the production volume increases. And I think it has. But the 25nm flash is new, and currently only IMFT can make 2X nm flash (X <= 5) suitable for SSDs. So the laws of supply and demand are also in effect. And the laws of engineering (including those that yields are lower in a newer process).

So, the prices are a little lower. And they should continue to decrease, although probably not steadily, but in fits and starts. I expect prices will take a leap down when the 2nd and 3rd companies start producing 2X nm flash.

As for having the features available to just turn on. I am nearly certain that is NOT the case. Do you understand what I mean by hooks? It generally means you left room for expansion. In programming, you might put in a line that tests a variable and calls a function, but the function does not exist yet so the variable is set so that the function is not called. But once the function is implemented, the variable is changed so that the function is called.

In the case of Intel's SSD controller, it is not actually the same chip in the 320 as in the X25-M. It is similar, but the revision is different. There were some changes in the silicon. And I am nearly certain that there were significant changes in the firmware. And certainly the features were not put through Intel's testing and qualifications for the older models. So if you think Intel is refusing to flip a switch to give the older parts new features, you are almost certainly wrong. Product development (including feature development) takes a lot of resources. That is built into the price of products. It is unreasonable to expect to get a feature for free.

[Anvil]

Considering that we are talking about a new product I'm thinking the prices are fair. Within a month or two I expect we'll see some minor changes.

Here are the current prices in Norway, the 160GB is very competitive on price.

g3_prices.PNG

Comparing the 300GB and 600GB to the competitors is almost a joke.
g3_prices_newsizes.PNG

Exchange rate is close to 5.6

So, imho, the prices are fair to very good depending on size.

[alfaunits]

Those are higher prices than almost any EU place. I know Norway is expensive, but it doesn't mean much.
One can be more expensive in one place, and cheaper in another.

I agree with Ao1 From a mediocre performer with cheaper NAND, I expected prices that are cheaper than the competition, minimum.
The Vertex 2 prices at that retailer are so ridicolous, they aren't even for a discussion (Vertex of 300GB would be/is around 400eur = ~3200 NOK in rest of Europe).

[idolclub]

Some G3 25nm specs:

— Write Endurance (80GB): 10 Tera-bytes
— Write Endurance (120GB): 15 Tera-bytes

About 33% increase over X25-M G2 34nm 80GB and 120GB.

[Brahmzy]

Looks like the 160GB is the sweet spot. Very tempting to grab two of them. Sick of waiting on these vaporware Vertex 3's.

[Ao1]

Interesting that Intel publish stats for random write 100% span. Basically the same for all SATA SSD's in that scenario - Write IOPS drop to HDD performance levels very quickly.

I'm not knocking the 320. If I was buying from new it would be my 1st choice, especially as I am still on SATA II, but it's way too expensive to justify an "upgrade".

Hopefully Intel' 's real successor to the G series comes out sooner rather than later.

[Anvil]

With a little luck I'll have a pair of the 160GB's by Friday
(got the tracking# this afternoon)

A pair of these does not cost much more than my first 160GB G2 cost me.

Should be interesting as all reviews are done with the 300GB.

[felix_w]

With a little luck I'll have a pair of the 160GB's by Friday
(got the tracking# this afternoon)

A pair of these does not cost much more than my first 160GB G2 cost me.

Should be interesting as all reviews are done with the 300GB.

Great!!!


Awaiting for results...

[Brahmzy]

With a little luck I'll have a pair of the 160GB's by Friday
(got the tracking# this afternoon)

A pair of these does not cost much more than my first 160GB G2 cost me.

Should be interesting as all reviews are done with the 300GB.

Dang... NICE.

Wondering if I should do the same....

[Anvil]

Yeah, I really like the 160GB drives, perfect for a lot of scenarios and the price is right imo.

@Brahmzy
They've just released the V3 specs, the V3 120GB is really down on read iops vs the 240GB, actually it's down vs a lot of drives.
Link to OCZ
Looks like the 240GB is the minimum capacity for eXtreme users
I've got one of the 120GBs on order and I'm sticking to the order, price is equal to the 320 Series 160GB atm.

v3_performance.PNG
"¹ To achieve maximum performance specifications a native 6Gbps controller is suggested"
"2 Maximum Sequential Speeds are determined using ATTO"
"³ Small file I/O performance is measured using Iometer 2008, Queue Depth 32, 4KB Aligned"

Think I'm going to start a new thread on the V3 unless there are other V3 threads that are suitable?

[Brahmzy]

Yeah, I really like the 160GB drives, perfect for a lot of scenarios and the price is right imo.

@Brahmzy
They've just released the V3 specs, the V3 120GB is really down on read iops vs the 240GB, actually it's down vs a lot of drives.
Link to OCZ
Looks like the 240GB is the minimum capacity for eXtreme users
I've got one of the 120GBs on order and I'm sticking to the order, price is equal to the 320 Series 160GB atm.

v3_performance.PNG
"¹ To achieve maximum performance specifications a native 6Gbps controller is suggested"
"2 Maximum Sequential Speeds are determined using ATTO"
"³ Small file I/O performance is measured using Iometer 2008, Queue Depth 32, 4KB Aligned"

Think I'm going to start a new thread on the V3 unless there are other V3 threads that are suitable?

Yeah, I've seen the AS SSD numbers for the 120's on SATA2 & SATA3 vs the 240's. They're actually only down on seq. writes for the most part. These are on 6G intel ctlr ports using intel drivers. I'll be RAID0'ing 2 120's so scaling on seq writes is good - R0 120's will outperform 1 240GB hands down, with plenty of R0 headroom.


VERTEX 3 SATA3 120GB vs 240GB
Seq.. Read 482.9 - 507.4
Seq.. Write 156.7 - 275.9
4k.. Read 19.6 - 20.3
4k.. Write 68.5 - 67.4
4k-64 Thrd.. Read 117.3 - 190.8
4k-64 Thrd.. Write 151.0 - 201.7
Access Time Read (ms) 0.14 - 0.05
Access Time Write (ms) 0.31 - 0.23
Read Score 185 - 262
Write Score 235 - 297
Overall Score 506 - 688

[Anvil]

I noticed that comparison, question is, is that using the shipping firmware.

Also, the most noticeable "speed" penalty is the random read on the 120GB, half the iops of the 240GB, for most users it won't change a thing though.

2R0 V3 at any capacity should be great fun.