IDF 2008 - Intel Solid State Drives and Inside The X18-M

[Apoptosis]

IDF 2008 - Intel Solid State Drives and Inside The X18-M

One of the most anticipated SATA Solid State Drives (SSD) to come to market has been the upcoming series by Intel. During a briefing at IDF yesterday we found out some more details on these drives and actually have an non-working engineering sample to take home with us. Read on to see the features on the Intel Solid State Drives and see what they look like inside!

Flipping the drive over we see that the model number for this drive is SSDSA1MH080G15M and is an engineering sample that has no warranty. The drive had some weight to it, so we opened it up to see if it could be a working drive. With the cover removed by simply popping it off we quickly found that the controller chip, which renders the drive useless. It is highly likely that these drives were using a controller chip that was not used on the final versions. Rather than throwing away the internal samples they used for R&D they figured they could give them to the media..

Article Title: IDF 2008 - Intel Solid State Dirves and Inside The X18-M
Article URL: http://legitreviews.com/article/774/1/

[geokilla]

When it comes to performance Bradd Berdelman from Falcon Northwest brought a cpuple Fragboxes to do a gaming demo showing how the Intel SATA SSD's will improve gaming perfomance in the game Crysis. He flipped the numbers on his PowerPoint presentation, but a single SATA SSD had 32.65 frames per second (FPS) versus the 16.76 FPS found on an identical system with a pair of Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drives in RAID0. Bradd said that during the benchmark that the game needs to pull data off the disk drive and the WD VelociRaptor setup in RAID 0 had a latency of 7-8ms verus a latency of just 0.1ms on the Intel SATA SSD. Over the course of the benchmark the hundreds or thousands of disk reads slow down gaming performance enough to make a difference in the performance numbers.

That can't be possible. The picture states that the 10K VelociRaptor in Raid 0 generated an average FPS of 32.65, while the Intel SSD generated only 16.76FPS.

[Apoptosis]

yeah, he had the slide numbers wrong.... too funny, but really bad timing to catch the error!

[gwolfman]

lol, too funny!

did you see any actual benchmarks to confirm throughput?

[Zertz]

Isn't the 16MB RAM used as cache?

[martini161]

an interesting thing to see would be SSDs using the Pcie interface

[gwolfman]

an interesting thing to see would be SSDs using the Pcie interface

That's be nice. Like the gigabyte i-RAM but on PCIe. Sweet!