Intel 320 SSD aka G3

[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.