Ask an Intel Solid State Drive Engineer @ [H]

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FrgMstr

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Ask an Intel Solid State Drive Engineer - Intel recently offered our readers the opportunity to ask one of its engineers questions about Intel Solid State drives. You guys obliged with a more than enough questions. Today we get the answers.


Q. How do SSDs compare to traditional HDDs?

A. Quite favorably, of course Seriously, though, the choice of SSD vs. HDD is a trade-off like everything else. The significant disadvantages are cost and capacity. The most obvious advantage is performance, but there are other advantages that might be of interest in some applications.
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Thank you so much for the information. Given the reviews here at [H] and this info, I am planning to use an SSD as my OS drive on my next system.
 
Nice! I'm going to use an SSD for games and programs for now, waiting till capacity or price changes to pick up a couple of 120gb ones
 
Nice article, thanks for taking the time to do this.

I'm using a 32 gb ssd as my LOTR drive to load high res texture Faassttt. No hitch when moving zone to zone.
 
With the report of a 1TB SSD at CES, this really looks like the year that SSDs are going to take off.

pureSilicon Debuts World's First 1TB

Feature summary
-- 1TB SSD in 2.5-inch form-factor (highest density ever at
2.5-inch)
-- 300MB/s SATA II interface
-- Industry-leading performance
-- State-of-the-art industrial design

Specifications - Nitro Series SSD:
Capacities: 32GB, 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1024GB
Performance
-- Transfer rate: 300MB/sec
-- Sustained read: 240MB/sec
-- Sustained write: 215MB/sec
-- Random read (IOPS 4K): 50,000
-- Random write (IOPS 4K): 10,000
-- Latency < 100 µsec
Reliability
-- MTTF: 2.0 million hours
Environmental
-- Temperature (operating): 0°C to +70°C
-- Temperature (non-operating): -45°C to +85°C
-- Shock (operating): 1500G, duration 0.5ms, half sine wave
-- Vibration (operating): 20G peak, 10~2,000Hz, x3 axis
Power
-- Active: 4.8W typical
-- Idle: 0.1W typical
Physical
-- 2.5in form factor: 100.2mm x 69.85mm x 9.5mm
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New OCZ Vertex SSD.

550MB/s read

OCZ has shown us the prototypes of Vertex 2, their next generation SSD, and the company's CEO Ryan Peterson and EVP and Chief Marketing officer Alex Mei were kind enough to show us a first glimpse of the drive's performance.

The drive is insanely fast as this internal quad raid drive can write at up to 480MB/s and read around 550MB/s, depending on the size of the files.

This is specially the case with big files and in reality at this speed you might copy a 20GB file in just 41.66 seconds, and we are sure that video editing guys are going to love these numbers. In order to achieve thee speeds you will have to get to SATA 3.0, as SATA 2.0 is maxed out at 300MB/s per device. SATA 3.0 on the other hand gets you all the way to 750GB/s which will be enough even for Vertex 2.

This drive will come the market in late Q1 2009 and we reckon it will be ready for Cebit. Here is how it looks in action.
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qdemn7 said:
With the report of a 1TB SSD at CES, this really looks like the year that SSDs are going to take off.

pureSilicon Debuts World's First 1TB



New OCZ Vertex SSD.
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These stats have me intrigued. I'm wondering how much these new units are going to cost when they hit the market later this year. At the current going rate for SSDs, it would seem to me that a 1TB drive would be ludicrously expensive -- but then, it's also geared more towards server farms than personal use. Still, that space/performance looks sexy from a gamer's perspective.

The Vertex2 speeds are obviously wasted until SATA-3 becomes standard... but when it does, I think there's a lot to be said for being able to load an entire DVD movie or modern game into memory in 8 seconds. Just gotta wait for some price drops, but SSD tech is looking very promising so far.
 
Wow that was a very informative article! Cool stuff. I wonder how big the SSD would be if they filled a 3.5' drive form factor? (I saw the post about the 1tb SSD nice!) The parallelism is going to kick SSD in as the next gen storage system. Hurray for teh future!!!
 
An engineer with easy to follow plain English explanations.:D I would like to see much much more on the H in the future.

Thank you
 
I don't even want to see the prices on those new drives...

I just picked up a couple OCZ Solid 30gb and put them in RAID 0 on my main system. I followed the instructions on the OCZ forum for aligning the partition and installed Windows 7, and there have been no hitches/stutters. ATTO measures above 250 MB/s read and over 150 MB/s write.

Swap file is not a good application for SSD due to the small amounts of data that are written repeatedly. That's where SSD doesn't keep up with HDD so far. With enough RAM you can disable virtual memory, anyway.
 
I hope intel will develop either cheap ssd for netbooks or maybe sell just the controllers. I don't know how good the wear leveling on the netbook ssds are but it would suck if they die in 2 years...
 
qdemn7 said:
That would be sort of redundant would it not? :confused:
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Not only is Dram faster, as stated above, but it has been shows that having a cache, like on a raid controller, would actually greatly improve SSD performance because it would stream line the requests. (instead of interrupting them)

But, that's just my understanding from a few posts here where people Raided their SSDs and had none of the infamous JMicro controller problems.
 
I enjoyed the article. I don't have anything to add to the discussion unfortunately, but felt like sharing my enjoyment of it anyway. :)
 
Yes, good read. Most of it was already known or assumed, but still kinda nice to hear it out of an engineer's mouth.
 
Very nice read.

The thing I thought most intriguing was the whole issue about how current operating systems and file systems are built around optimizing performance for HDDs, and that geez, with similar optimizations (in windows 7 hopefully as Jon suggested), SSDs will deliver even more breathtaking performance.
 
Many thanks to J. Schmidt for answering some questions. Very informative article.

I actually hadn't seen Kyle's video review of the Intel SSD until [H] was collecting questions for this. Once I did, I knew I had to get a couple to play with (even if the Intels are out of my price range). After a little bit of research and preparation, learning what SSD does well and what it doesn't, I'm definitely going to be using SSD from here forward.
 
Q. Are there different "grades" of flash memory? Why are USB sticks so much cheaper at the same capacity?
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I like how this question was answered. Interesting.
 
Great Article

Would love to see more of this sort these ask an engineer type things. Far better than PR spin and I like how it was not full of "no comments" it looks like he actually spent some time on this which is good to see.
 
Would take some intelligent predictive algorithms to make use of a lot of cache memory in SSD's. The cache memory on your harddrive is mostly there to mask the latency of the drive, not to improve the performance of sequential reads/writes. With a SSD, the latency is already virtually 0 compared to a mechanical drive.

It looks like the horrible write performance of SSD's will go way this year. Many cheap, small SSD's used in Netbooks suffer from extremely poor write performance, making the whole OS just freeze for seconds while data is being written, even if it's just a tiny amount of data. OCZ Core and other drives utilizing the JMicron controller suffer from similar problems.
 
alot of the SSD based netbooks was just plane slow when running XP, asus have an thing as well where they split the ssd 4gb/4gb leaving no space for the c: drive

best to avoid them for now and stick with hdd based drives untill faster cheap flash comes

cache on the SSD i thought it was strange that thay did not have that as it should make some buffer there for data going to the ssd,
if you use an intel based chipsets (not sure about Nvidia any more they lost performance options years ago) you can turn on the Write-back option using the Intel Matrix program (i think it works for RAID and none RAID id have to plug one it to find out) that would likey hide the slowness of jmicron MLC based SSD disks and (thats all MLC based disks apart form Intel MLC as they made one that works Very well)

this one is really only work for hard disks as they only have cache at the moment (until they start fitting 64mb cache on SSD or more) if your using vista (XP i think its on by default) you can turn on advance disk performance on the disk, at first i did not know what it was doing but if you use Intel Matrix you see that it has turned the harddisk Disk cache on i am assuming for Write operations

the 2 above options make it way more likely to lose data if power is loss to the pc but the chipset driver should make should make the pc go bit faster
 
Can someone explain just how OS have been optimized for hard drives, and contrast this with how they would be optimized for SSDs? :confused:
 
Brahmzy said:
Do those SSDs come with any onboard cache?
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I did post that question in the original pool, unfortunately it did not get picked for answering. My reasoning for the question was because that was a theory behind why the Intel MLC drives often equaled or even bested other companies' SLC drives.

qdemn7 said:
Looks like you're correct. New OCZ Vertex SSD ... featuring up to 64MB onboard cache..
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Looks like there is definitely an advantage to having cache on-board just as it is with normal HDDs. Perhaps it's an even bigger advantage than with an HDD since read/write speeds are that much faster they will burn through cached instructions more quickly.
 
i would have asked this:

Intel makes a lot of money, why not charge a lot less for your SSD drives.. COME ON MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :p
 
This has probably been discussed before, but would using a PCI-e SATA card to connect a SSD have any benefits to onboard SATA?
 
artimusbill said:
This has probably been discussed before, but would using a PCI-e SATA card to connect a SSD have any benefits to onboard SATA?
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Most likely not anything noticeable unless your onboard is only SATA I (1.5Gb/s ~ 187MB/s) and the PCI-e card was SATA II (3.0Gb/s ~ 364MB/s) or if you are planning to use the PCI-e card that can do RAID, which is addressed here:

Q. How well does RAID-0 work with SSDs? Can RAID-0 be done inside the drive?

A. Let me answer the second question first and point out that SSDs are already massively parallel. The current Intel SSDs use 10 parallel channels to access the flash media, so in a way, it's already a 10-way RAID-0 on the drive.

Doing RAID-0 with multiple SSDs works very well, but make sure your RAID card is up to the task. SSDs are individually capable of enormous amounts of throughput, potentially much more than the RAID controller was designed to handle.
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Based on your sig I see it implements an nforce4 controller that has SATA II 3.0Gb/s and has RAID capability. I remember hearing reports of NVidia chipsets causing corruption in RAID arrays that would affect your mobo. If you are planning on doing a RAID setup I would play it safe and do it on a known reliable PCI-e board. If you just want to toss one in your system you should be alright going with the onboard methinks, but I would do some further investigating to be sure on that.
 
Silent.Sin said:
Most likely not anything noticeable unless your onboard is only SATA I (1.5Gb/s ~ 187MB/s) and the PCI-e card was SATA II (3.0Gb/s ~ 364MB/s) or if you are planning to use the PCI-e card that can do RAID, which is addressed here:



Based on your sig I see it implements an nforce4 controller that has SATA II 3.0Gb/s and has RAID capability. I remember hearing reports of NVidia chipsets causing corruption in RAID arrays that would affect your mobo. If you are planning on doing a RAID setup I would play it safe and do it on a known reliable PCI-e board. If you just want to toss one in your system you should be alright going with the onboard methinks, but I would do some further investigating to be sure on that.
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Wow. First, thank you for the reply. Second, I need(ed) to update my sig. I think the advice stands though.
 
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