SSD Drive Toolkit

Solid state drives are gaining increasing popularity and you can be sure that more and more people interest about purchasing that devices. Enthusiasts will find these drives excellent tool for getting the record results in the PCMark 2005 tests. Users who work with graphics programs will receive significant disk subsystem performance growth. For example Adobe Photoshop starts almost instantly with SSD. Gamers certainly appreciate the increased speed of levels loading etc. In any case, this technology is just interesting.

OCZ Vertex 2.5'' SSD

People from PC Perspective(pcper.com) decided to research productivity of OCZ Vertex SSD. This line of Solid State Drives is based on multilevel (Multi-Level Cell, MLC) flash memory NAND-type. This type of flash memory (MLC) is supposed to have less performance than SLC-based flash memory. Up to 64MB of cache memory is the solution to this problem in OCZ Solid State Drives. In addition, the products are based on an advanced architecture with an updated controller. This controller for OCZ Vertex 120GB is the Indilinx IDX110 chip, and cache memory module manufacturer is Elpida. The main capacity of SSD consists of Samsung chips.

For their tests researchers selected a several more drives to compare:
* OCZ Summit 250 GB SSD;
* OCZ Apex 250 GB SSD;
* Intel X25-M 80 GB SSD;
* OCZ 64 GB SSD SATA-II;
* Western Digital VelociRaptor 300 GB WD3000GLFS;
* Western Digital Raptor 150 GB.

The main competitor is Intel X25-M 80GB drive which is built on the MLC NAND flash memory. Thus, the memory type is the same as OCZ Vertex 120GB has, so let’s to see which product will be faster. Main infromation is presented below:

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Intel SSD Roadmap 2009

According to the leaked Intel’s SSD roadmap (that you can see above) capacity if its solid-state drives will be doubled by the end of 2009. This is due to the transition from old 54nm technology to 32nm. New technology process together with an updated controller will improve SSD performance. The new SSD lineup will include 3 capacities for the X18-M and X25-M MLC SSDs: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB. For the top Intel’s model X25-E SLC SSD will be 2 capacities available: 64GB and 128GB. Detailed pricing is unknown but we can expect low price/GB of capacity at the moment of new solid-state drives release.

The Intel company has announced the start of sales of new SSD (Solid State Drive) – X25-M 160 GB. It’s 2.5/1.8  inches disks with SATA interface. X25-M based on MLC (Multi-Level Cell) NAND flash memory chips.

Intel SSD x-25M 160GB

Intel claims that SSDs have 250 Mb/s reading speed and 70 Mb/s writing speed. Also with this device you can count on 1 200 000 hours of work without failures (average). X-25M can effectively operate in temperatures from 0 to 70 degrees Celcius scale.In addition, the product has very good resistance to adverse effects of shocks(1000G for 0.5 milisecond) and also relatively low power consumtion (150 mW during workload).

Intel future SSD plans

Intel continue to gain market of SSD with its solutions. The tactic is simple – create SSD with good quality and low price. It’s not necessary to achive best quality or lowest price, just to be better than average in both categories. Price of latest Intel’s SSD is expected around $600 for OEM vendors. But it’s possibly price will be slighty less than that for end users when we would have opportunity to order SSD X-25M. Of course it’s more expensive than price on HDD, but SSDs can do large jump in advance on notebook market during 2009. Time will tell us.