New Intel SSD roadmap

[johnw]

I bet the 311 is SLC because Intel's new caching gizmo does a whole lot of writes to the SSD, since the most frequently accessed datasets would likely change a lot.

That may be a consideration, but I think the main reason is that even a 40GB Intel 320 SSD can only write at 45 MB/s, and the 311 is only 20GB so its write speed would be horrible if it did not use SLC flash.

I noticed from the picture of the 311 circuit board in Anand's review that the 311 does not appear to have the large capacitors that the 320 has for power-loss protection. Instead, there is a large "ISSI" IC that I cannot read the small print on. DRAM, I guess.



Speaking of write speed, I wonder how well a 64GB Samsung 470 would do as a cache drive. It has the highest incompressible data sequential write speed of any MLC 64GB SSD, and the Intel chipset apparently limits the cache size to 64GB. But if 4KB random write, especially at high QD, is more important than sequential write speed, then the Samsung 470 would not be a great cache drive.