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

Fusion-io, makers of really really fast SSDs, announced a new line of workstation storage cards, the ioXtreme. Marketed primarily towards workstations used in film and television production, as well as high-end gaming rigs, the ioXtreme has an 80 gigabyte capacity and screaming fast transfer speeds averaging around 520 MB/second.

Icrontic spoke with David Flynn, Chief Technology Officer at Fusion-io. David was very excited about the ioXtreme and quite confident of its performance. This was made evident by his passion for his work, as well as Fusion-io’s presentation on the show floor at their booth. In fact, I would suggest that Fusion-io has one of the most impressive booth setups at SIGGRAPH this year. There is a wall of LCD displays, and across this wall is a composite of 1,200 different DVD quality video feeds, all playing at the same time via a single ioXtreme card. The video is completely smooth, with not a single hiccup to be found.

That's 1,200 DVD quality videos streaming at once

David stressed that the ioXtreme is not to be considered much of a storage drive, but rather a high speed method for moving data on a computer. He says the speed of the ioXtreme allows unprecedented response. For instance, it allows compositors to work on HD video feeds in real time.

David explained to us that we are in a new world order of multiple core processors. We buy more cores rather than faster processors. As a result, I/O required an overhaul. Standard hard drives become a bottle neck. Disk drives are great at mass storage, but slow to move large sets of data. The ioXtreme’s strongest suit is pushing data quickly and reliably. The two types of storage devices working together creates an ideal setup that pushes information at blazing speeds.

The ioXtreme will retail at the manageable price of $895, besting most single level cell SSDs on the market today. Its release will be soon, and prospective buyers can join a mailing list on their site to be notified of when the card becomes available.

Enthusiasts are excited about the SSD’s tantalizing possibilities, but it’s true that most of us would rather take one square in the jewels than summon the bones for solid state. Might the SSD market soon emerge from the ninth level of pricing hell? If Intel — and their herculean manufacturing capacity — has anything to say about it, that just might be the case.

Intel has announced that the next generation of the X25-M SSD that stunned reviewers with its speed and reliability will soon launch to the tune of massive price cuts.

What’s the big deal?

While most NAND cells that lie at the heart of any SSD are fabbed on a 50nm process node, the new X25-M models use a brand new 34nm process. The transition to the 34nm process does nothing for the drive’s sustained sequential speeds which remain at 250/70MBps read/write, but it has improved read/write seek and read/write latency to 65µs/85µs and 4.2ms/4.7ms respectively.

Most importantly, however, the transition to 34nm allows for the production of some 30% more cells per wafer. As the PC industry is no stranger to the laws of supply and demand, the savings have been passed on to us in the form of a 60% price cut. That’s right: The new X25-M drives are 60% cheaper than their predecessors.

VP and GM of Intel’s NAND Solutions Group Randy Wilhelm explains that the transition was about performance and cost.

“Our goal was to not only be first to achieve 34nm NAND flash memory lithography, but to do so with the same or better performance than our 50nm version,” he said. “We made quite an impact with our breakthrough SSDs last year, and by delivering the same or even better performance with today’s new products, our customers, both consumers and manufacturers, can now enjoy them at a fraction of the cost.”

Cost and models

The new X25-M will be dropping in 80GB and 160GB flavors, though a 320GB model is expected by the beginning of next year.

Intel X25-M 80GB (SSDSA2MH080G2C1): $225.00 USD
Intel X25-M 160GB (SSDSA2MH160G2C1): $440.00 USD

Perks and musings

Once Windows 7 launches in volume, Intel has pledged to join manufacturers like OCZ and GSkill with a firmware update to support the heavily-touted ATA TRIM command. The new command will allow SSDs to keep tabs on the whereabouts of their free space so they can continue to maintain a consistent level of performance throughout their lifetime. Solid state disks without TRIM are doomed to performance decay that can only be righted through a hard wipe of the disk’s contents.

We can all agree that the $/GB ratio of the X25-M is not a stone’s throw away from toppling the mechanical drive. But we can agree that an instant 60% price cut to one of the market’s fastest drives is an exciting event. Between etailer markdown, future price cuts and competitor response, the SSD may just be finally coming into its own.

The OCZ Z-Drive PCI-e mounted solid state drive concept we saw at CeBIT will be a retail product soon.

Over the last few days I’ve had the privilege of talking solid state with Tony Leach of OCZ, Olin Coles of Benchmark Reviews and Tom Colarusso from FiringSquad. We’ve all come to the consensus that SSDs are amongst the most inappropriately-tested devices on the market.

Knowing that programs like ATTO and transfer tests give unreliable results, we use them anyhow because there are no tools that can adequately do the job. Combine this with bad Windows support, crappy controllers, skewed expectations and the eccentricities of the SSD’s performance/reliability mechanisms, we have a whole lot of irritated reviewers and confused users.

As an example, wear leveling technology can give read/write performance that can swing up to 30MB/s in either direction with every run of a transfer test. Can we really be relying on these types of programs given their penchant for specious results?

The entire SSD industry (users, vendors and reviewers) have been forced to perpetuate inaccurate metrics for lack of something that better describes an SSD’s performance characteristics. For want of that better metric, even SSD manufacturers themselves gravitated towards mechanical throughput figures (MB/s sustained) to describe a technology that rarely operates in a sustained transfer environment.

We also speak in terms of IOPS, burst and seek, but they are just a piece of a superior and more accurate metric. Whatever comes of this, it should answer these important questions: How can we demonstrate objectively that one SSD is better than another, and both are superior to the HDD?

We’re close to doing it right, but we’re not there yet. Not even manufacturers with millions invested in R&D are doing it right. But for the sake of accurate numbers — the pride of every reviewer — we are working hard to develop a standardized testing methodology. The need to review these complicated and dynamic products, to serve users in a reliable and accurate way, should be the priority of every website. It’s that important.

For more on the eccentricities of the SSD, take a look at these three pieces to read why this issue is so complicated:

Icrontic
Benchmark Reviews
Toms Hardware

Using a technology that dubbed “ExtremeFFS” (flash file system), SanDisk claims that it is set to improve SSD write performance by 100 fold.

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tbreak reviews the Intel X25-M 80GB solid state drive.

G.Skill gets into the solid state drive game with their sweet 64GB Samsung-based SSD.

TweakTown reviews the Crucial 32GB 2.5″ solid state drive and come away unimpressed.

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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