What makes the Intel SSD's so special?

[next-Jin]

I tried looking for articles and the only thing I have seen were the anand articles but he never really said why. Is it the 4k IOPS reads?

 

[drescherjm]

Is it the 4k IOPS reads?

And 4k IOPS writes. Also when you compare speeds keep in mind that the quoted Sandforce write bandwidth is not realistic in the real world since it assumes compression. In addition Intel appears to have the best reliability of any SSD manufacturer.

 

[sub.mesa]

The X25-M has an SRAM implementation, while all the other controllers use DRAM. This means lower latency, which has been documented in several reviews.

The Intel controller was the first to allow NCQ to saturate more than 1 channel during random reads, so with Intel having 10 channels this increased multiqueue random read performance up to a factor of 10, which also helps.

The write speeds are fairly limited on Intel, but the random write speeds are almost the same as the sequential write speeds on a non-degraded Intel SSD, which is a sign of a good controller.

The Intel G3 will feature a DRAM implementation again, so it might have higher read latencies.

 

[JohnHenrySolo]

Intel makes them special. I know they will work without issue and as intended.

 

[vraa]

I only use Intel SSDs.

FWIW I'm an AMD fanboy.

 

[MaxBurn]

Really simply under real world usage patterns for a home computer OS drive they perform excellently. They were consistently better than anything else when I bought mine but I haven't kept up with recent SSD events so it's possible there is something better now.

 

[john4200]

When Intel SSDs first came out, there were a lot more Windows XP users, and Windows XP does not generate 4KB-aligned partitions. The Intel SSDs were (and probably still are) the only SSD that had good performance for unaligned writes.

 

[Computurd]

reliability and steady state performance. when a SSD gets degraded, its performance suffers. now the thing is that no matter what SSD you get, you will always be in one level of degradation or another. so how your device performs in this real world level is what is important. intels excel at this.
reliability there is no comparison, period. Intels OWN that distinction.

 

[RhoXS]

... now the thing is that no matter what SSD you get, you will always be in one level of degradation or another.

Is this really true when TRIM is implemented?

Based on a number of articles I recently read, I perceive TRIM will very closely maintain the drives original performance. Do I perceive this correctly?

 

[john4200]

Is this really true when TRIM is implemented?

Based on a number of articles I recently read, I perceive TRIM will very closely maintain the drives original performance. Do I perceive this correctly?

Your perception is mostly correct, provided two things:

(1) The SSD is not almost full. As the SSD gets closer to full, TRIM will obviously provide less benefit (nothing to TRIM).

(2) It is not a Sandforce SSD. The write performance of Sandforce SSDs drops a lot after heavy use, even after TRIM. Apparently, the performance can drop off for a week after heavy use, regardless of TRIM.

 

[sub.mesa]

First generation SSDs do not degrade in performance, they are always slow for random writes since they do not redirect writes.

Second generation SSDs redirect writes in a mapping table, which also makes them prone to degrading performance if this mapping table becomes fragmented and no free erase blocks can be found.

It's actually just a balance between performance and storage capacity; if you reserve enough spare space, you should not see any distinguished performance penalty in steady state performance (after a warm up).

 

[Old Hippie]

I tried looking for articles and the only thing I have seen were the anand articles but he never really said why.

They're just all around great drives.

I'm using Crucial now but they definately command a premium and aren't that much better.

 

[venomous42]

just too high priced for me, which im not so sure i would get alot more performance over my 300g velociraptors to justify the extra cost.

 

[william_fontaine]

just too high priced for me, which im not so sure i would get alot more performance over my 300g velociraptors to justify the extra cost.

I've found that the drop in annoying Raptor head screeching is a great benefit of replacing with an X25 (or other SSD), not to mention the still very noticeable speedup in OS and program startup and load times.