Intel 311 SLC SSD and Smart Response Technology
A
A lot of the work we do in the Embedded PC market hinges around SLC flash drives. For consumer applications we use lower cost MLC drives because you get great performance and more space but for a lot of industrial applications there's too much risk of the drives burning out. Algorithms that manage wear leveling have gotten a lot better on the MLC side but for SLC we've really depended on companies like Innodisk whose product line is expensive per GB.
Intel now has a 20GB SLC SSD at about £6 per GB and with much faster performance and we'll soon be offering it on our embedded PC range.
What's really cool about this technology though is that it features SRT (though this requires the Z68 Chipset): you can massively speed up hard drive performance by using this as cache. That is GREAT for a server application and we tested this in-house with our FreeNAS box. You take a low cost 2TB drive and make it perform much faster by writing everything to the SLC drive. You don't have to worry about burn-out because it's SLC. Note: we did this with an Innodisk SLC 1GB eUSB flash module but the principal is the same.
As usual Anandtech has a great writeup which I'd recommend.
Shoot Out: Intel X25-V 40GB SSD vs. WD3200BEVT HDD vs. Pretec 8GB SSD , Bonnie++ Benchmarks
We've already sold a handful of these Intel X25-V SSDs to customers and listed them on the website. V is for value and it is slower than the X25-M but still boasts a decent theoretical read speed (175MB/s), compared to the Kingston SSDNow value line that is 100MB/s. Albeit, this is alongside a very low write speed (40MB/s). The write speed would seem to be comparable to a 5400RPM hard drive and we're pitting against one our favourites the Western Digital Scorpio Blue 3200BEVT, a very quiet 320GB 2.5" drive that doesn't have the whine that Seagate laptop drives do. But its' about 20% less expensive than faster SSDs (like the ATP reviewed below) and offers 40GB of space instead of 32GB.
Update: added the 8GB Pretec SSD (actually a CF card inside a SATA enclosure) that we sell with the T1.
I installed Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 Alpha 2) and bonnie++. Results are below (all in MB/s)
- Block Output on SSD: 43.735 MB/s
- Block Output on HDD: 82.322 MB/s
- Block Output on CF: 8.160 MB/s
- Rewrite on SSD: 31.022 MB/s
- Rewrite on HDD: 34.232 MB/s
- Rewrite on CF: 10.793 MB/s
- Block Input on SSD: 211.938 MB/s
- Block Input on HDD: 84.112 MB/s
- Block Input on CF: 53.330 MB/s
- Random Seeks Per Second on SSD: 3674
- Random Seeks Per Second on HDD: 162.7
- Random Seeks Per Second on CF: 2167
No surprise but Random Seeks is where SSDs just kill it - no stupid moving platters to spin up. On the other hand they are reasonably matched elsewhere and the hdd is a little more than a third of the cost. Will update shortly with our Fujitsu 40GB drive since these are the 3 we use across our product range.