The move to 34nm should make a big difference in capacity and price while still maintaining the performance.
Intel Solid State Drives - Intel’s X-series of solid state drives use NAND flash chips based on a 34nm process. What does that mean? Higher capacities, lower prices and continued fast access times. Conventional hard drive heads have to spin platters, find the right sector, position over it, and transfer the data to the system—usually an 8000-micro second or so process. With no moving parts, Intel’s solid state drives can access data in about 85 microseconds—about 100 times faster.
The SSD’s controller chip stripes data to each NAND module. The X-series uses a 10-channel controller tied to 20 NAND chips mounted on the PCB. At a component level, the drive operates like a striping RAID 0. For even more performance, take multiple SSDs and tie them into a multi-drive RAID for sequential reads of up to 250 MB/s.
Help your customer choose between an SSD based on multi-level cell technology, like the mainstream X25-M, or single-level cell technology like the X25-E. With SLC, each flash cell holds one bit. With MLC, each cell holds two or more bits. Higher data density per cell drops the price per gigabyte, but it’s also slower, especially on writes.
SLC flash cells are rated to withstand 100,000 write-erase cycles while MLC cells average around 10,000. Special “wear leveling” algorithms in the controller make sure that write-erases are applied evenly throughout MLC modules, but SLC drives still offer much higher MTBFs.
We really like that SSDs are dead quiet, and have a 1,500 G shock rating. Plus SSDs can deliver huge power savings. A 2.5" platter- based drive can dissipate 2.5 watts when active and 0.85 watts at idle. Intel’s SSDs power numbers are more than 10 times less.
Notebooks and storage solutions continue to be hot items, even in tough economic times, and offering solutions to your customers that incorporate SSD drives makes good sense.
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