Following just behind the official launch of Windows 7, Intel has announced the immediate availability of firmware and a utility to give all Windows users access to the ATA TRIM command on the company’s lineup of X25-M G2 SSDs.

What is ATA TRIM?

An SSD’s total size is composed of thousands of smaller units called “blocks,” which average about 512k these days. SSDs deliberately try to spread written data across all of these blocks so as not to prematurely wear out the memory chips, which can only accept a limited number of writes. This technique is called wear leveling. Over time, wear leveling guarantees that every block on the SSD will become filled with a hodgepodge of active and deleted data. Once this happens, new writes force the drive to perform an intensive process called the read/erase/modify/write cycle.

An REMW cycle forces an SSD to scan its blocks for deleted files, copy active data to cache, purge the deleted files, append the new data to the data in cache, and then write the cache back to the new free space. This is called write amplification, and in serious cases, it can force an SSD to shuffle up to 20GB of data just to write 1GB of new information. This causes significant performance issues for SSDs.

The solution to this problem is to let SSDs physically erase files the moment they are deleted in the OS, and that is precisely what the TRIM command does. Windows 7 is the only Microsoft OS that supports it, and it must be used with a TRIM-compatible drive like the OCZ Vertex, G.SKILL Falcon and now the Intel X25-M G2.
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Today Micron unveiled a new line of MLC NAND cells which it claims improves write endurance over traditional cells by 600%.

Micron’s new MLC Enterprise NAND device achieves 30,000 write cycles–a 6x increase in endurance when compared to standard MLC NAND. And for enterprise applications that are more performance driven, Micron today also introduced a 34nm SLC Enterprise NAND device that achieves 300,000 write cycles – a 3x increase in endurance when compared to standard SLC NAND.

Additionally, leveraging the full performance capability of NAND, Micron’s newest Enterprise NAND products also support the ONFI 2.1synchronous interface, delivering a 4- to 5x improvement in data transfer rates when compared to legacy NAND interfaces. Micron’s 34nm Enterprise NAND portfolio includes a 32Gb MLC NAND chip and a 16Gb SLC NAND chip that can be configured into multi-die, single packages supporting densities up to 32GB MLC and 16GB SLC, respectively.

The new cells are an evolution of the company’s 34nm NAND technology developed in conjunction with Intel Corporation. Micron will begin sampling the new products this year, and will begin volume shipments in spring of 2010.

Reality check: Micron’s definition of “standard” MLC and SLC NAND cells is nebulous at best. For example, SSD OEM Mtron offers a 32G SLC NAND product with a 5,000,000 cycle write endurance. Put another way, that’s 100GB of data erased and written to the drive every day for 85 years. That is a complete rewrite of the disk’s contents three times a day.

Even Intel’s MLC-based X25-M G2 drive is estimated to have a 31,500 cycle write endurance, which is good for 20GB of erase/write sequences a day, every day, for five years. If that’s not enough, the company has included a 100GB/day margin of error.

So, when an OEM quotes an endurance figure at you–particularly in the funky fresh world of NAND–take a look around. It might not be as impressive as it seems.

It costs as much as your entire desktop.

After a redesign and six months on the burner, OCZ has finally released its PCI Express SSD solution.

Dubbed the “Z-Drive,” the new SSD product comes in two flavors: The e84 series with SLC NAND cells, and the p84 series with MLC NAND cells. Both variants are mated to 256MB of onboard cache and plug into a PCI Express x8 slot.

On the SLC front, the e84 drives offer the choice between 256GB or 512GB, with sustained performance at or around 800MBps read and 750MBps write, respectively. SLC is slightly quicker on the draw, and that’s reflected in the 16k IOPS to the 10k offered by the MLC cells in the e84.

The MLC-based e84, meanwhile, comes in 256GB-1TB flavors and tops out at 870/760MBps for the 1TB model. As we mentioned above, the p84s offer a “mere” 10k IOPS to the e84’s 16k.

The drives are available on the US side of the pond from Amazon and other retailers for $1560-$3370 USD.

Crucial recently entered the high-speed SSD game; how do their new goods stack up?

IM Flash Technologies, the joint venture between Intel and Micron, has announced volume production of 3-bit multi-level cell (MLC) NAND cells by the end of 2009.

While the current crop of flash drives and capacious SSDs use 2-bit cells, the 3-bit cell could improve capacities by fifty percent for the same physical dimensions.

IMFT has already released 32Gb (gigabit) evaluation chips that measure just 126mm². Each chip — about one fifth the size of your average postage stamp — contains nearly 11.5 billion of the new 3bpc cells.

“We see 3bpc NAND technology as an important piece of our roadmap,” said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron’s memory group. “We also continue to move forward on further shrinks in NAND that will provide our customers with a world-leading portfolio of products for many years to come. Today’s announcement further highlights that Micron and Intel have made great strides in 34-nanometer NAND, and we look forward to introducing our 2xnm technology later this year.”

The 3bpc announcement comes just weeks after the introduction of 34nm cells which have slashed costs and improved storage density by over thirty percent. It is expected that these 3-bit multi-level NAND cells will get their sea legs in flash drives and flash cards.

For more information on NAND/flash memory, consider Icrontic’s primer entitled “The hows and whys of SSDs.”

Intel has halted sales of its new 34nm SSDs as a result of a firmware bug which renders the drive’s data inaccessible if users configure and then alter or disable a BIOS password.

Digitimes is reporting that lofty contract prices for 16Gb and 32Gb MLC NAND chips is expected to harm the adoption rate of SSDs throughout 2009 and 2010.

The penetration of SSDs will only reach 1-1.5% in the regular notebook sector in 2009, and less than 10% in the low-cost PC segment, according to a recent survey by DRAMeXchange. Despite optimism, SSDs are still finding it hard to gain broader appeal due to higher NAND flash prices.

Latest quotes gathered by inSpectrum show that the average contract price of 16Gb and 32Gb multi-level cell (MLC) chips stood at US$4.04 and US$7.12, respectively, in the second half of May, compared to around US$2 and US$4 earlier in the year.

Intel Corporation announced amidst Computex that it would revive efforts to accelerate programs by caching their I/O on flash memory modules bundled with upcoming Lynnfield chipsets.

Intel has dubbed the technology Braidwood and explains that it leverages flash memory to store application I/O to significantly accelerate tasks like opening a program or executing common tasks.

This is not the first time that Intel has attempted to cache application I/O. The firm previously developed an analogous technology known as Robson which was later launched to lukewarm reception under the Turbo Memory moniker.

The microprocessor firm has said that it will bundle Braidwood technology with platforms that include the 5-series Lynnfield chipset and GPU+CPU derivatives of the Lynnfield CPU.

In what seems to be a growing trend, SanDisk announced today that it would be selling back 30% of its flash production capactiy to Toshiba. SanDisk is the second company (after Micron) to leave the flash manufacturing process to others.

Solid State Disks are poised blow the doors off of traditional storage media. As the inevitable end-game of the great bet on flash memory, they are coming in strengthening numbers to obliterate benchmarks, make or break companies, and free-fall in price. The revolution this nascent market is set to unleash will leave few questions as it makes a staggering rise to preeminence.

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