Intel SSD's For Every Level

Written by John Martinez

Hardly a corner of the industry in 2009 wasn’t buzzing with anticipation or excitement about the stunning performance and plummeting prices of solid state drives (SSDs).

Keith Josephson of Ion Computer systems took what he learned about SSDs from Intel and used it to take his server business to a whole new level.

Hardly a corner of the industry in 2009 wasn’t buzzing with anticipation or excitement about the stunning performance and plummeting prices of solid state drives (SSDs). Fresh into 2010, though, a new challenge arises: How can the industry take the well-known benefits of SSDs and turn them into solutions that will draw in mainstream audiences, not just eager early adopters?

Keith Josephson, vice president of engineering at Ion Computer Systems in New York, left the last Intel Solution Summit with a head full of potential answers. He knew that transactional enterprise applications crave high I/O operations per second (IOPS). He knew that single-level cell (SLC) SSDs are the highest-performing technology in the SSD space. And he knew that running multiple drives in arrays could magnify aggregate performance. But then what?

Josephson went extreme, creating a storage server housing 24 Intel X25-E SSDs. He bonded these with three Intel SAS controllers, and, in order to have enough processing bandwidth for such a high-throughput array, planted it on an Intel server platform running two Xeon X5570 processors. Dubbed the SR-71 SpeedServer, the 2U titan could exceed 600,000 IOPS. An equivalent server based on hard drives would require many hundreds of disks and incur an eco-nightmare in energy consumption. In comparison, all 24 Intel drives under load consume less than 60 watts.

Intel’s new 34 nm X25-M “G2” drive once again sweeps the consumer SSD field on total performance while simultaneously bringing this speed down to surprisingly low price-per-gigabyte levels.

SLC drives remain the industry choice for top-speed storage tasks, but advances in multi-layer cell (MLC) technology have altered the market for 2010 and beyond. With the new generation of Intel 34-nanometer process X25-M drives running the latest firmware enhancements, these drives have taken a 30% leap in write performance and redefined storage for the mid-market. For example, Ion Computer’s Josephson designed an alternative model, the SR-71 SpeedServer RM, based on 24 of the new X25-M drives aimed at content delivery and Web server markets. The machine can crank out over 120,000 IOPS.

The mixing of MLC drives into the enterprise server world is a fairly new idea, not just because of the performance levels now possible but also the unexpectedly low prices. The 160GB X25-M currently retails for around $500, a fraction of what a top-end SSD would have cost even one year ago. Practically every current review of consumer SSDs ranks the new X25-M as the fastest drive now available, creating a remarkable price/performance opportunity in high-end systems. Mega-performance systems such as Ion’s are one route, but even a simple RAID for SMB servers can yield lightning fast capabilities within even downsized budgets.

Of course, for high-end consumers, the 160GB X25-M is today’s must-have SSD. Those wanting to back off in price without sacrificing performance will find the 80GB model aggressively priced in the $300 range. A year or two ago, serious gamers raved about 10,000 RPM hard drives. Now they want the random read performance only a top-flight SSD can deliver. Storage capacity still resides on magnetic platters, but when ultra-fast reads matter, an X25-M—or even two or three of them in a striped RAID—can give enthusiasts and even workstation professionals the extra boost they need above competitors.

The new Intel X25-V opens up a new spot in the entry-level consumer market for SSDs, combining Intel’s reputation, quality, and 34 nm flash process with an affordable way to reap the benefits of SSD in everyday computing operations.

Finally, Intel has a brand new 34 nm SSD value offering for mainstream consumers, the X25-V. Priced well below $150, this is the unit users in both the home and office should seek out as a primary boot drive. The X25-V keeps all of the power-saving benefits found in higher-end SSDs and still boasts a 170 MB/sec sequential read spec. Combined with almost instantaneous random access times, the X25-V can radically accelerate common Windows tasks, such as system boot, application loading, and recovering from standby. For each of these tasks, the X25-V can potentially shave away minutes at a time compared to conventional hard disks. We’ve even measured it in-house. A Windows 7 image that took four or five minutes to boot on a mainstream hard drive now takes less than 30 seconds on an X25-V.

With this entry-level SSD, Intel gives system builders a persuasive way to move clients into the dual-drive era, even at the low-end. The X25-V or X25-M gives systems speed, and a hard drive handles the data storage. In business markets, the X25-M and X25-E offer unparalleled price/performance for high-demand servers. Intel has the right drives for every segment. If your customer base hasn’t found a place for SSDs before, it will now.