Intel X25-M G2: Previews & Reviews

[metachronos]

NOW they conroed the SSD market.

That was either a typo or the most clever pun I've seen in a while.

Good show.

[saaya]

how has intel conroed the ssd market... geez... did you even look at the graphs and read the previews?
the new drive is slightly faster in some tests and slightly to notably slower in others... it has a much worse read speed, that seems to be the only drawback...

even in benchmarking you wont notice a notable diference between gen1 and gen2...
and in real world usage you will DEFINATELY not notice if you are on a G1 or G2... or third party SSD for that matter...

intels G2 is the fastest, overall... by a tiny tiny advantage from what ive seen so far...
that doesnt really make them the best drive, not at all, pricing will decide that...

[lowfat]

Looks to me as the performance is barely noticable. But it is the price that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

[Telperion]

Intel undercut the competition on pricing with a greatly superior product... what are you looking at is my question.

[labs23]

I'm thinkin how long will Intel hold the lead, and the slight gap due to lower pricing vs. other SSD makers. Having other manufactures(with their controllers) catching up on Intel is a good thing for us.

[Machinus]

Is there a good explanation of the SLC/MLC lifetime differences, and other relevant technologies?

[saaya]

Looks to me as the performance is barely noticable. But it is the price that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

what price?

Intel undercut the competition on pricing with a greatly superior product... what are you looking at is my question.

im refering to the articles in the first post of this thread... and you?

you guys are so easy PR victims... :P
i admit anandtech is doing a real good job at making those drives look nice, but come on, look at the numbers and draw your own conclusion please...

1.)

The new 34nm drives were supposed to start shipping yesterday, but I've yet to see them available online. It's also worth mentioning that Intel doesn't give out street pricing, only 1,000 unit pricing. The street price of the X25-M G2 drives could be higher at first, similar to what we saw with the 1st gen drives, eventually leveling off below the 1Ku pricing.

http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/sho...spx?i=3607&p=3

2.)
retail prices will be higher, at least initially, but what the h3ck lets say the prices drop real fast and the competition does NOT lower their prices.
anand is doing a good job at not directly comparing drives, as it would show how intels new ssds arent anything revolutionary at all...

sorted by price:
$225 Intel X25-M 80GB
$223 Patriot Torqx 64GB
$218 OCZ Vertex 64GB
$177 OCZ Agility 64GB

OOOOPpps? whats that? Intels new ssd is the most expensive?
and thats the 1ku price and retail will most likely be even higher?
yes, its 64gb vs 80gb so the intel drive gets you 16gb more... i doubt this changes anybodys buying decision though... especially since you can get a comparable ssd for almost 50$ less for some time already...

sorted by price:
$440 Intel X25-M (34nm) 160GB
$389 OCZ Summit (Samsung) 128GB
$385 OCZ Vertex (Indilinx) 128GB
$365 Patriot Torqx (Indilinx) 128GB
$329 OCZ Agility (Indilinx, non-Samsung Flash) 128GB

OOOOOOOOOOOOOooppps???
Intels new ssd is 50-110$ more expensive than the competition?
and this is not the final street price but the 1ku price?
here its 32gb diference in size, but again, i doubt anybody cares if performance is comparable and price is 50-100$ less...

so please stop following anand on his intel bias trip trying to make this look like the next best thing after sliced bread when all intel did was introduce sliiiightly faster ssds that cost notably more than the competition. yes, the fastest ssd is from intel, but its also notably more expensive and how much the extra performance actually matters in real world scenarios id really like to see... all at and pcp ran so far are synthetic server benchmarks...

thank you

EDIT: im totally open for reviews to show that the new ssds are really better and faster than competing ssds in real world perf and worth the price premium, or hey, lets hope prices of the intel ssds go down, who knows... but from what ive seen so far this is nothing but a PR spin, and its a cheap and bad one...

[Tomasis]

sayya, you are on right track..

what is surprising that other manufacturers are so slow to lower prices. Maybe 34nm takes some time for other.

64gb 150$.. I would go for it instantly.

Agility or Intel, no much difference Beat me if you want

[largon]

I bet the price difference we have been seeing between Intel's and others will reappear once the competition will get their hands on Samsung/Toshiba 32/30nm flash later in the fall. I bet they both are aiming to release drives with inhouse controllers at Win7 launch time, so I doubt Intel will be enjoying their advantage of 34nm flash for long. Sandisk's drives have been due for sometime already... I wonder what's taking them so long?

On a sidenote; small random writes are very much unimportant in desktop usage.
And interesting to see Intel has expanded their DRAM cache - I thought cache was just means to patching bad controllers.

[F0rr3sTT]

this
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid...=expert&pid=11
is a nice feature, no?

I believe the only ssd listed above that does this is the summit

i don't wanna spread falsehood, someone please correct me if i'm wrong, or fill in details

EDIT: actually, i thought i remember reading on the ocz forum that in order for Summit to TRIM (right?) it should be left on but idle for ~12 hours, whereas the G2 appears to autocorrect even while HDTach is running.

[Levish]

retail prices will be higher, at least initially, but what the h3ck lets say the prices drop real fast and the competition does NOT lower their prices.
anand is doing a good job at not directly comparing drives, as it would show how intels new ssds arent anything revolutionary at all...

sorted by price:
$225 Intel X25-M 80GB
$223 Patriot Torqx 64GB
$218 OCZ Vertex 64GB
$177 OCZ Agility 64GB

they will be higher initially I agree but the intel $/GB is better than Vertex
and to boot you get something that rules the roost at random reads/writes

its the new conroe of SSDs like it or not

[GoldenTiger]

they will be higher initially I agree but the intel $/GB is better than Vertex
and to boot you get something that rules the roost at random reads/writes

its the new conroe of SSDs like it or not

Yup... $/gb is lower, and the speed is better for what matters and overall.

[krille]

Improvements to the write combination algorithm and the maintenance of a larger LBA remap table required the move to a larger 32GB SDRAM chip

LOL. I hope not.

edit: OnT: Why are Intel's MLC sequential write speeds so much behind the competition? Is there a definite optimizational trade-off between "RW" speeds and "SW" speeds on MLC drives? Or are they deliberately and artificially hampering their own drives, so as not to push the progress too quickly, in turn allowing themselves to reduce/post-pone future R&D costs?

[HKPolice]

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...tCode=10010790

$230 retail for 80gb G2. Saaya, you are wrong. OOOOOOOOPS!

The only ssd that comes close to intel's performance are the barefoot based controllers + samsung ssd which costs around $220 for 64gb (formatted capacity is 60gb, whereas Intel's 80gb SSD is the formatted capacity). So at most you'll be paying an extra $20 for an extra 20GB + higher performance.

[Mech0z]

Cant decide if I should buy the new 80Gb intel and replace my 60Gb Vertex in my Desktop, seems like gains are minimal. Would be nice to throw the Vertex in the laptop though

[Jamesrt2004]

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...tCode=10010790

$230 retail for 80gb G2. Saaya, you are wrong. OOOOOOOOPS!

The only ssd that comes close to intel's performance are the barefoot based controllers + samsung ssd which costs around $220 for 64gb (formatted capacity is 60gb, whereas Intel's 80gb SSD is the formatted capacity). So at most you'll be paying an extra $20 for an extra 20GB + higher performance.

+1....

[Hornet331]

http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/Produc...tCode=10010790

$230 retail for 80gb G2. Saaya, you are wrong. OOOOOOOOPS!

The only ssd that comes close to intel's performance are the barefoot based controllers + samsung ssd which costs around $220 for 64gb (formatted capacity is 60gb, whereas Intel's 80gb SSD is the formatted capacity). So at most you'll be paying an extra $20 for an extra 20GB + higher performance.

Inded, intel has now the price/performance corwn in that segmant.

There 80gb MLC costs as much as others (Indilex or Samsung based) MLC 60-64Gb SDDs. And till the others don't cut prices this is a valid argument.

Maybe anad only show 4k wirtes, but thats the worse case and every other case only gets better, so intel drives will be on top in every other random read/write scenario to.

[alfaunits]

Maybe anad only show 4k wirtes, but thats the worse case and every other case only gets better, so intel drives will be on top in every other random read/write scenario to.

No, the difference between G2 and other drives will be smaller in other situations as we go from Random 4K -> seq. reads.
The write performance however is superbly over what the competition offers though.
I do wonder how much of it is the cache however!

[Farinorco]

The only ssd that comes close to intel's performance are the barefoot based controllers + samsung ssd which costs around $220 for 64gb (formatted capacity is 60gb, whereas Intel's 80gb SSD is the formatted capacity). So at most you'll be paying an extra $20 for an extra 20GB + higher performance.

Now that's one thing that I find curious (bold quoted text). I suppose that when you're talking about "formatted capacity" you're referring to the units conversion (they say "64GB" referring to "64,000,000,000 bytes", when "64,000,000,000 bytes" are really "59.61GB" because 1KB isn't 1000B but 1024B, and the same with MB and GB). The same thing why 1TB drives are not 1TB drives but 1,000,000,000,000B drives, or 931.32GB drives (0,91TB).

60/64GB SSD's are using, AFAIK, 8x8GB flash memory chips, and Intel 80GB SSD's are using, AFAIK, 10x8GB flash memory chips, so I'd have thought that Intel 80GB drives are in fact 80,000,000,000B=74,51GB drives when using the x1024 convention instead of the x1000 convention.

Not that it matters much, but it's my curiosity bitting me again: are really 80GB Intel drives 80GB=85,899,345,920B drives, or are they 74,51GB=80,000,000,000B as the 10x8GB chips had made me think?

[Cold Fussion]

sorted by price:
$225 Intel X25-M 80GB
$223 Patriot Torqx 64GB
$218 OCZ Vertex 64GB
$177 OCZ Agility 64GB


sorted by price:
$440 Intel X25-M (34nm) 160GB
$389 OCZ Summit (Samsung) 128GB
$385 OCZ Vertex (Indilinx) 128GB
$365 Patriot Torqx (Indilinx) 128GB
$329 OCZ Agility (Indilinx, non-Samsung Flash) 128GB

All you proved is that the intel drives a better $/gb ratio compared to its rivals bar the lower end Agility drive.

$230 retail for 80gb G2. Saaya, you are wrong. OOOOOOOOPS!

Saaya wrong? Has that ever happened before?

[3NZ0]

These look great!

Makes you wonder if their gpu's will do this as well when they arrive.

[cx-ray]

Not that it matters much, but it's my curiosity bitting me again: are really 80GB Intel drives 80GB=85,899,345,920B drives, or are they 74,51GB=80,000,000,000B as the 10x8GB chips had made me think?

They're 80,025,219,072 bytes.

[Gogeta]

NOW they conroed the SSD market.

Hahaha!

I'm glad I waited to make the transition to SSDs. I'll be purchasing two of the 80GB variant...one for the mythtv htpc and one for my everyday workstation.

[Manicdan]

Whats the ETA on other companies moving to 34nm?

[Farinorco]

They're 80,025,219,072 bytes.

Thank you, so they are 80,025,219,072 = 74,53GB drives, as I thought (that is, 80 thousend millions bytes, not 80GB by the x1024 convention).

So when comparing, we should talk about 64GB vs 80GB, or 60GB vs 75GB. Got it.