Intel 34nm SSD will have a 60% reduction in price!

Did any of you guys who ordered through Newegg get your drives yet? Mine was marked as shipped, but unexpectedly I am receiving emails from Newegg saying that I RMA'd my drive? Is Newegg recalling these drives because of that stupid password problem?

Is there a Newegg rep on this forum?

*update*

I spoke with a Newegg rep, and as I feared, my order was cancelled. The explanation I was given was that the item was defective or damaged. My guess is that it is because of the password problem. So, now I am back to refreshing the damn Newegg site over and over again until they are in stock.

Or maybe I will order through someone else.....

Sh*t!!!!!!
 
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I received my drive this evening from newegg (80GB X25-M G2)... love the thing :D. Sorry to hear about people having their drives forcefully cancelled due to what is really a negligible problem that will be fixed soon with a firmware update :(... I'd be REALLY aggravated if they had done that with mine. I imaged my entire old SSD to this one and then benched:

intelg2x25mgoldentiger.jpg


I'm happy :).
 
Did any of you guys who ordered through Newegg get your drives yet? Mine was marked as shipped, but unexpectedly I am receiving emails from Newegg saying that I RMA'd my drive? Is Newegg recalling these drives because of that stupid password problem?

Is there a Newegg rep on this forum?

*update*

I spoke with a Newegg rep, and as I feared, my order was cancelled. The explanation I was given was that the item was defective or damaged. My guess is that it is because of the password problem. So, now I am back to refreshing the damn Newegg site over and over again until they are in stock.

Or maybe I will order through someone else.....

Sh*t!!!!!!

Well, I am not happy with Newegg on this one.
They canceled mine also, actually claimed it was shipped, and gave a tracking number to me on Friday. Then, the package never showed any progress, and shows as returned to Newegg today, and as a voided tracking number. Newegg then issued me an RMA, showed it as received, approved, done.

I have never set a HDD password in my life, never would, and I am not happy to not be able to make my own decision on the matter, especially with new f/w being due in the next 2 weeks.
 
awesome! So buy the G2: format one partition and install the OS +Games and call it a day?

If not using Windows 7 (which automatically detects SSD), disable defrag. That is probably all.
I leave indexing etc on because I love 0.1 second searches. The vista start menu is SUPER fast.
 
My drive came Monday. So far no issues its around 15MB/s faster than my G1 on reads.
 
i spoke to newegg.ca. .. they said my order does not have an RMA and that is onroute to my home.... hopefully it comes
 
Count me in the group who ordered and did not receive.

The Newegg rep via chat was not aware of the problem. S/he did a little research and only was able to say that "intel determined that a recall is not necessary." Not really sure what this means. I said that if it's available I would still like to complete the order and receive the product. No go here, s/he just said it has been "deactivated" on their site and that I could order it again "once it comes back in stock". Mmmk. I asked if there was any sort of reservation system and if so can I reserve one somehow/preorder/reorder one, and the answer was no to this. I am not surprised, but it would have been nice to ensure that the people who got hosed would have first dibs on the drives again once they fix/flash/decide to just ship them anyway again. Oh well.

I related my dismay at not getting any kind of update from Newegg regarding the shipping hold due to the problem Intel had discovered and was investigating. I said that it would have been appropriate to allow vendors to ship or not ship based on their customer's option. I suppose that is a lot of work for Newegg/whatever company... but it seems like a no brainer from my pov.

Ultimately I stated that I was not pleased with how it was handled, especially the lack of communication, even if you we were not given a choice to receive or not receive the "flawed" drive. I asked for a credit equal to the amount of overnight shipping to my zip code. The rep said I would be getting an email with an answer. We'll see on the credit.

So, that's my story.
 
This is the first time that I have ever been disappointed in Newegg's service.

when i called them. they had no idea of an RMA situation and they said there shouldn't be a problem and the drive will be delivered..

, no one knows whats going on :(
 
Wow, I got the rolleyes - so mature. It's like I pissed in y'all's Cheerios or something. I should have said "most" instead of "some." And yes, the priorities ARE the normal desktop user.

I was more noticing how drastically different the G2's overall emphasis is over, say, the Vertex. I'm using a G1 at work and will be ordering 5 G2's for my team as soon as they come in stock, in case you thought I was bashing them or something. Defensive posts...

I think some may have interpreted your comment(s) as a complaint born of Intel not yet releasing larger drives (as some people commented earlier in the thread)... Either way (size or write speed) they're definitely focusing on building the best mainstream drive they can, probably so they can be at the forefront of the SSD market when it truly explodes. Nothing wrong with that to be sure, it just means there's still some room for the competition to compete even if they can't out-gun Intel in a price war.

Those "My SSD Rocks!" stickers are hilarious... Sorry to hear a bunch of you are still having trouble getting your drives from Newegg even though you ordered them before they were yanked though... Hopefully it's resolved soon. For everyone else, they've dropped the price on the G1 80GB X25-M to pretty much the same as the G2 so that's always an option I guess.
 
The first row shows the system in idle, and the second row while using Intel Burn Test for 469.48 seconds.

everest3jzlh.png



Here are the test results

intelburntestresults8zst.png



Test results of bencharking the Intel X25-M

crystaldiskmarkresultso9ff.png




1. Why do other people have better CristalDiskMark results ? Could I do anything to imrove them ?



2. While the CPU was cooling down, core 3 and 4 don't seem to decrease below 38 and 40 degrees respectively.

Do you think that might be stuck temperature diodes again ? I thought Intel have fixed these problems.



3. At full load, the temps can go up to almost 100 degrees. Is that acceptable still ?

I noticed that during the test, the 100% load broke down a few times. I guess some kind of heat protection kicked in and about 5 seconds later it went back to 100%.



4. Does anyone know what the difference between GPU Diode and MCP is, as can be seen on the Everest readings above ?

I presume that MCP is the Northbridge, that's why I labeled it that way in brackets, but I'm not 100% sure.
 
For those of you, like me, who got screwed out of their Newegg orders it looks like they have the Intel drives back on their site. They are not in stock but the ETA is 8/28. :(

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167016

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167017

Also, if you look on those pages it says: "Temporary out of stock, please use N82E16820167005" on the 80GB page and "Temporary out of stock, please use N82E16820167015" on the 160GB page.

In case you didn't know, those are the part#s for the Gen-1 drives.

Does that not seem a little shady that Newegg would be redirecting people to the pages with the Generation 1 drives?
 
Eh, but if you look at those benchmark numbers that are floating around, the random write performance on the G2s is 40% higher than the G1. I would feel like a sucker if I bought the G1 even at the G2 price.
 
Does that not seem a little shady that Newegg would be redirecting people to the pages with the Generation 1 drives?

Not really, they are still a business and are going to try to convert traffic on the site into business one way or another. They aren't hiding anything.
 
Making business is the universal excuse for all kind of things.
Business does not know the meaning of morals or ethics because there is just one priority: generating money.
 
Making business is the universal excuse for all kind of things.
Business does not know the meaning of morals or ethics because there is just one priority: generating money.

Do you believe that them providing the part number for the G1 drive (that you would still have to copy and paste and you would still see the full product description of the G1 drive) is immoral or unethical?
 
I guess they provide the PN of G1 because some people (read business orders) cannot afford to wait 2-3 weeks until Intel starts selling them again.
 
Can more people post steady state benches for G2? I haven't seen any since I posted:

"Steady state":

2009-07-26_0138.png


You know you've reached steady state when you've written more then 80GB (or 160) to the drive.

In general I am pretty sure Crystaldiskmark results are bogus. The X25-M dominates in threaded/asynchronous workloads which CDM totally neglects. AS SSD or customized Iometer tests are a much better performance metric.
 
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Hi jimhsu, I wouldn't like to fill up my new SSD for testing the Steady state - performance.

That is the result after a fresh Windows 7 build 7100 (RC) installation as well as MS Word and a few small applications:

ssdi5w9.png
 
You need not fill it up. Simply use the drive for a week or two, installing and removing programs, documents, etc. That will naturally fragment the drive and give steady state performance. It happens with any SSD.
 
Yea, what's the pedigree of Crystal DiskMark, anyhow? Real world (compile time?) benchmarks?

Hardforum had this posted: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1433884

"One of the most important is that the program uses FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING when creating the file handle that it reads to or writes from, but does not provide an aligned buffer to the ReadFile() or WriteFile() calls subsequently used against the handle. This means that the driver must still do some buffering, which enables it to do caching, which will alter the results."

Basically all drives on controllers produce bogus results on CDM.

And CDM uses blocking (synchronous) IO's for all random RW tests. That obviously doesn't reflect a modern multitasking operating system.

"But I might not bother: Crystal Mark Disk seems fundamentally flawed in that it always issues a synchronous I/O to the device under test. As a result, it never queues up more than one operation, which means that larger-scale devices (such as enterprise drives or advanced RAID controllers) are never going to get a chance to reach their potential, particularly in the random-access tests. Even commodity-class devices will perform at least a bit better with a deeper queue."

As for AS SSD; I'm not sure how legitimate it is compared to something like IOmeter (which is often too annoying to set up), but it's a lot better.
 
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Maybe I'm the strange man out, but as a Linux and Mac user, I'd prefer somethingless relative to Windows and it's file handling.
 
More benches for those who like benches:

Performance mark (IOmeter simplified):

All runs 4K, Win32 uncached, synchronous, 500MB test file, 60 seconds

100% Read, 100% Random

4kread.jpg


100% Write, 100% Random

4kwrite.jpg


50% Read, 100% Random

4kreadwrite.jpg


The 50% read test is the most difficult one and basically tests the ability to interleave a heavy R/W load. Note the controller adapting to the workload near the end.

Asynchronous (32 threads) results below:

100% Read, 100% Random

ready.gif


100% Write, 100% Random

write.gif


50% Read, 100% Random

multiplediskreport.gif
 
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I think I finally found the Achilles Heel of the X25-M: Poor random read performances under a heavy seq write workload.

Observe:

4K Random read (red) + 1 MB seq write (yellow)

seq.png


4K Random read (yellow) + 4K random write (red)

randomukt.png
 
I think I finally found the Achilles Heel of the X25-M: Poor random read performances under a heavy seq write workload.

Observe:

4K Random read (red) + 1 MB seq write (yellow)



4K Random read (yellow) + 4K random write (red)

Id like to see your results with a mechanical drive to compare.
 
It gets quite a lot better with asynchronous I/O (32 threads). Maybe it wasn't as easy to kill as I thought:

(The line below is always the read)

4K random read 32 threads, 1MB seq write synchronous

46304126636b696f1f7b.png


4K random read 32 threads, 1MB seq write 32 threads

46304126636b6ac474d0.png


I'll probably give some time for my SSD to recuperate. I shudder to think what will happen when running this on a JMicron SSD - probably will fry it or something.

Hard disk - results for WD6400AAKS

4K random read synchronous, 1MB seq write synchronous

04126636b683fb72f.png


Red line - 5 KILOBYTES a second

4K random read 32 threads, 1MB seq write synchronous

46304126636b68d8efb1.png
 
My first SSD is gonna be an 80GB Postville ... YAY !!

intelpostvillee680.jpg


... or should I go for 160GB ?

I don't really see the need for a windows boot drive that's bigger than 80GB unless you're planning to put a lot of apps on it.
 
Games are really the only apps that will balloon an OS drive for most normal people.
 
If you have a Steam installation folder that will bite a huge chunk out of a drive. An 80G definitely won't be enough unless all you plan to keep is CSS, TF2, +1 game w/ expansions, and that alone will eat up 20-25GB.
 
If you have a Steam installation folder that will bite a huge chunk out of a drive. An 80G definitely won't be enough unless all you plan to keep is CSS, TF2, +1 game w/ expansions, and that alone will eat up 20-25GB.

i personally wouldn't bother with most of games but mmo
 
Guys, please ... we don't need to discuss about how much storage you need for this and that.

We all know about the limited storage space of SSDs ... so those who need more space just continue to use conventional HDDs until we have SSDs as big and as cheap as HDDs. Just a matter of time.
 
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