Intel halves SSD power draw with 20nm chip shift
335 series of solid-state drives launched
Intel has updated its line of low-end solid-state drives by introducing the 335, a 240GB 6Gb/s Sata unit based on 20nm Flash chippery.
The chip giant claimed the 335 delivers up to 500MB/s sequential read and 450MB/s sequential write speeds. For random read and writes, it can do 42k IOPS and 52k IOPS, respectively, Intel said.
Those specs match what the existing 330 series drives offer - across a broader array of capacities too. What distinguishes the 335 from its predecessor is its power consumption characteristics: active and idle power draws of 350mW and 275mW, respectively, 41 per cent and 45 per cent of the 330’s figures.
There’s no official word on pricing, but early data from online retailers suggests a price of around £150 over here.
BTW, Intel has also posted a new version of its SSD Toolbox software, tweaked to meet the needs of folk upgrading to Windows 8. The app, says the chip maker, helps users keep their Intel SSD in prime condition. It also adds RAID 0 Trim support with RST 11.x drivers, Plug and Play Support and proactive user notifications. Get it here. ®
COMMENTS
Re: 42k IOPS and 52k IOPS...
Because IOPS is about as good a statistics as BogoMIPS.
Operations per second means nothing. Is the operation a 1-byte delete, a 1Mb-read or a 1Gb write? Without further context, the IOPS number means nothing.
Even stating bandwidth - i.e. MB/s - can be deceptive and wrong and vary enormously over time for a storage device.
Same when you state the same for databases - transactions per second? What kind of transactions? Without further context (which is never provided and/or never consistent across manufacturers) you might as well be stating random numbers.
Rule #1 - never buy anything based on statistics without TESTING your workload first.
I don't want it faster.
I don't want it smaller.
I don't want it with prettier software.
Gimme some damn data capacity on the "old" speeds / form factors / software / prices and I'll buy one TODAY. In fact, I'll have two.
Seriously, SSD is a huge enough leap without poncing about with a 0.1% improvement here and there. But what stops me upgrading is that I'd have to have FOUR of them in my laptop to not lose space. I *do* happen to have a laptop with 2 drive bays, but I'm very fortunate to have that and not everyone has that option. But still both drives I use are 1Tb, so whatever I do I sacrifice huge amounts of storage space, at great additional cost, for a speed increase of the resulting tiny storage space. So I'm stuck with spinning disks for the moment.
The consumer market for these would be HUGE at the right price because you can make a PC appear twice as fast to those inexperienced with computers just by reducing RAM / CPU and slapping one of these in (and those people barely use all their storage anyway). But few target that market with SSD.
The nerd/gamer market would be HUGE at the right price because you make the PC fly, but those people tend to have LOTS of storage that they would need to sacrifice. And few target that market with SSD.
In fact, I can't really work out what the market is for SSD at the current prices. Guinea pigs?
Gimme a 1Tb at something less than my laptop cost in the first place (and no more than 1.5 times the cost of the 500Gb, which should be no more than 1.5 times the cost of the 256Gb - meaning 1Tb = 2.25 * 256Gb) and I'll buy it. Maybe two if it's cheap enough.
People seem to forget that the SSD is a STORAGE device. If it lags behind other storage devices in, well, the storage stakes, then it's a bit pointless. I'd gladly sacrifice 50% of the speed increase of SSD over hard disk for double the capacity (and don't get me started on "hybrid" SSD disks - that's NOT what we're talking about) or even double the reliability.
1Tb?
That's not aiming high, only 116.4GiB?
People need to learn that having capital letters in the right place changes the meaning by a lot..
Right tool for the job?
Why on Earth would you want or need 3tb of storage in a laptop, SSD at that?
I have an SSD in my desktop PC at home - runs the OS and the most commonly opened applications. I then have a hybrid drive which has all my Steam games on it and a further normal drive for things like video storage etc...
At work, I'm just installing a new storage solution for our network - it consists of a mix of enterprise SSD for virtual machines, SQL and other 'high IO' applications, SAS2 drives for ordinary storage, and then SATA3 for archival and D2D backup. Sure, we could have gone full SSD, but we would have paid roughly 10x as much and needed a *lot* more space to fit all the drives in.
You don't run a lawnmower on jet fuel, so why would you put everything on SSD?
Not bad
By some rough calculations, it should extend the battery life of the T420 laptop (which can run for maybe 10 hours) by another hour, i.e. 10% improvement, which seems pretty good. And hopefully cooler means more reliable (I've used other manufacturer SSDs and they did not last 3 years. No idea if Intel is reliable or not).
