SSD Drive Toolkit

Intel has confirmed the existence of a problem with its own new generation Solid State Drives and suspended sales. New SSDs are manufactured with 34 nanometer technology. In comparison with available on the market Intel’s SSD drives, these devices has more capacity, better performance and lower cost.

The issues in question relates to an error in the SSD’s firmware. If user will set BIOS password and then will delete it, there’s probability of failure that leads to loss of access to the information stored on SSD. Intel strongly recommends don’t proceed manipulations with BIOS password to users who have already bought new Solid State Drives. The company works hard to eliminate errors and promised to release corrected version of firmware within two weeks.

New generation 34-nanometer Intel SSDs are now manufactured in the 2.5/1.8 inches form factors and has 80\160 Gb capacity.

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:

(more…)

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.