Intel's 34nm NAND SSDs launch in two weeks

[Rhys]

Please inform me of the advantages of the Samsung drive other than cost/GB?
All reviews I have read comparing the Intel to the 2nd gen Samsung P series drives give a huge advantage to the Intel, claiming much better random writes.

I have not found a single review that gives the nod to the Samsungs over the X25-M's.

So you base a drives performance solely on random writes considering neither drive actually suffers stuttering issues?

You 'could' actually buy your self a nice cheap 128gb Sammy and kit it out with MFT and it would eat an x25's random writes (and general IOPS) for breakfast. It's 4k reads are also around 20% faster which I put more weight on them considering they generally outnumber 4k writes significantly.
You would also get significantly more sequential write performance as a bonus.

I'm guessing Intel use a similar technology to MFT on their drives because how else do they get 20mb/s 4k reads but 50mb/s writes when the sequential's are so poor?
If anything it should be the otherway around just like every other SSD.

My guess is writes are stored into the drives cache and do not get written to the drive until 8mb (Perhaps 4mb) worth of writes has been used up and then that 8mb is written 'sequentially' to the Nand while the remaining 8mb of cache is collecting writes ready to transfer another 8mb.

This would also help explain the good write amplification the x25 has also, since MFT pretty much solves write amplification and prolongs a drives life considerably also.

But of course I could be wrong.