Intel SSD is Awesome

[zatoicchi]

I wrote this article for the latest issue of CPU Magazine, it's about the recent announement that Intel is jumping in to the solid state hard drive business.


I have been writing quite a bit about Intel lately, often about the company’s quest to increase its platform real estate from within a personal computer. Last month I touched a bit on Intel’s much-anticipated Larrabee graphics platform; this month I’m writing about the chipmaker’s solid-state drives. Unless you’re living in a Unabomber shack somewhere in the deep woods, you probably heard that Intel announced its new SSDs at IDF this year.

Let me start by saying that I have a pair of these babies running in my Blackbird PC in RAID 0. Based on my experience, Intel has completely changed the game with these drives. Not only has the company made SSD relevant in high-performance scenarios, but through some complex algorithm management, Intel has managed to wipe the floor with any other storage technology on the planet.

Of course performance is important, but what about battery life and drive efficiency for notebook applications? Months ago, Tom’s Hardware wrote about the SSD battery life issue. They missed a few points, one of the most notable being that there is a direct correlation between the efficiency and performance of the drive and the overall battery life on the device. In other words, the slower the SSD, the longer it takes to run a task, thus the more battery life it eats. This is not the case with Intel drives; they are fast, efficient, and they actually extend the battery life of the machine compared to other SSDs. After installing a pair of them drives in RAID, my system literally boots Windows Vista Ultimate in seconds. Overall, I would say these new SSD drives

Intel SSD is Awesome

[Aurion]

wooow,looks awesome & I guess fits into the tinest notebook (if versions come to available soon) ever !!

[anon]

The one in the right of the pic looked like a mobile phone battery to me at first
You wouldn't think such a small black "thing" can hold so much information...

Intel has done its part: in the reviewer's tests, the SSD itself has performed good and fast. Now it seems it's time for Vista to do its share

[Aurion]

hehe,yeah but I don't think Vista will be reliable at all....you know how it is nowadays,so nagging on everything installed

[anon]

SuperFetch is specially annoying for SSD manufacturers - if it keeps normal HDDs spinning all the time, you can imagine what it does to SSDs, right? And they can't tell people to disable it at the same time Microsoft says "superfetch is one of the new Vista features that'll make your system faster and your life easier"...

[Aurion]

it's just simple....MS has to say that just to convince Vista users that they didn't waste their bux on investing on their yet to be promising project Vista....for SSD manufacturing,I guess they will find a backdoor since it's their business that pay for their fancy cars

[anon]

for SSD manufacturing,I guess they will find a backdoor since it's their business that pay for their fancy cars

Hardware affecting software? Well, maybe, we have "hardware DEP"... it could do something like disabling SuperFetch for its own security as long as it (DEP) is enabled