Solid-state disk drives outrun all competitors — Intel

Solid-state disk drives outrun all competitors — Intel

Solid-state disk drives are suddenly everywhere, but many are not much faster than a HDD, some take just as much or more power, and most cost a fortune! Intel took the time to do an outstanding SATA interface on their X18-M, X25-M, and X25-E 1.8- and 2.5-in. SSDs, employing 10 parallel NAND flash channels inside the drive. The M stands for Mainstream — 1.8 and 2.5 in. MLC flash drives. The -E is for Enterprise drives that have long lifetime SLC type flash and faster (170-Mbyte/s) write speeds. We decided to give the award to all three drives (you try to pick just one).

The real trick here is they have a latency of 85 µs, which gets you 35,000 IOPS, 100 times more than a hard-disk drive. This is really good when you are reading lots of small files, which your computer does a lot. One test of the XM25-E reported that a particular application loaded in 3.5 s, versus 17 s with the 5,400-rpm HDD that came with the laptop used for the test. Pretty impressive stuff. The -M is also a power saver with 0.150 W active typ. and 0.060 W idle typ; while the higher performance -E is 2.4 W active, 0.060 W idle (about the same as an HDD). Worth $550 (or $700 for the -E)? If you need the performance, yes indeed.

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