New Intel SSD drives are in!!!

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

160Gb model
80Gb model

Check the link for the 160gb model, i don't remember it being a C1 - and i thought it was going to be more expensive

Good Luck!

Have fun!

 

[masteryoda34]

Whats up with the slow sustained write speeds on the Intel drives?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

i don't know man, i just work here

 

[taltamir]

i ordered one from newegg... I can't wait to get my hands on this baby.

 

[postmortemIA]

OOS already! probably first batch was limited in numbers.

 

[Zap]

Anand did a preview with some benchies.

Originally posted by: masteryoda34
Whats up with the slow sustained write speeds on the Intel drives?

According to the preliminary benchmarks, while it has pretty low sequential writes, the random writes are better than anything else. Basically everything else pushes big numbers until the controller gets busy, then they get bogged down.

So, looks like there is still no single "best" MLC drive. With low sequential writes, installing or copying stuff to the drive would be slower than a VelociRaptor by 33%.

The Intel SLC drive has all the strengths of the Intel MLC drive without the weakness of low sequential writes. I'm wondering if Intel did this intentionally?

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

That does suck. I hope that changes by the time the 320gb drives are out. That's when I'm jumping on one.

 

[imported_spike99]

Got the 160GB last night

 

[taltamir]

question... if you are installing a massive huge game, and you are also doing a bunch of background tasks (ignoring the "please turn off all other programs" warning), wouldn't your install process be random writes instead of sequential writes?

 

[sharad]

^^ I guess it will be random but in fairly large chunks, assuming the installer doesn't copy files to the disk using small KB size writes.

 

[Denithor]

As of 8:30EST 80GB is OOS but they still have the 160GB available.

Also of interest - they have not dropped the price of the first gen drives yet. Hmm...bet those are going to hot sellers!

 

[glugglug]

ack DP

 

[glugglug]

Originally posted by: Zap
Anand did a preview with some benchies.

Originally posted by: masteryoda34
Whats up with the slow sustained write speeds on the Intel drives?

According to the preliminary benchmarks, while it has pretty low sequential writes, the random writes are better than anything else. Basically everything else pushes big numbers until the controller gets busy, then they get bogged down.

So, looks like there is still no single "best" MLC drive. With low sequential writes, installing or copying stuff to the drive would be slower than a VelociRaptor by 33%.

The Intel SLC drive has all the strengths of the Intel MLC drive without the weakness of low sequential writes. I'm wondering if Intel did this intentionally?

I guarantee installing stuff is dramatically faster than a Velociraptor. Random writes matter more than sequential even for that. Your typical installer application does a lot of random writes to register all the COM classes used by and file type recognized by the app, and to set stuff up for the Add/Remove programs app, etc. The only part that would be mostly sequential is copying game assets. And anyways where are you installing stuff from? Your DVD drive can't read much more than 10MB/s (and even that it can only reach on the second half of the disk).

The ONLY place where you will see an effect from the lower sequential write speed is copying large files to it. Well that and crash dumps. And even then it's better than most conventional hard drives. For the crash dumps I recommend making the WER directory a junction so they go to another drive. Also, consider this:
Velociraptor access time = 7.5ms (4.5ms seek time, plus 3ms for the platter to spin halfway around at 10K rpm to get to where it needs to be on average). 7.5ms * 70MB/s = 525KB head start for the SSD writing each file before the raptor even gets positioned to start the write. Since the Velociraptor's sequential write speed is 27.9MB/s faster than the SSD it takes 18.8ms for it to catch up, after writing 1842.2KB So when we say the Velociraptor has an advantage on "large" writes, this really means multi-megabyte files only. Writes this large are pretty rare. So much so that if the fragments of a huge file are all larger than 64MB, the defraggers built into Vista and Windows 7 don't consider the file to be fragmented.

 

[rcpratt]

There are a few (likely two) 80GB back in stock because I decided to go for one 160GB rather than two 80GB. FYI.

edit: Nevermind. Somebody ate them.

 

[taltamir]

And anyways where are you installing stuff from?

A 5 drive raid array its got excellent read speed...

but joking aside, those are some excellent points glugglug

me... i just gave up on ever having a sequential write again... torrents, anti virus, auto backups, indexing, and what have you nots are always accessing and using my HDD.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Are these new ones at least as fast as the older 80gb drives?

 

[taltamir]

faster. 85MB/s instead of 80 MB/s for normal writes. 2.5x 4k writes (IOPS). 2/3 the latency.

 

[magreen]

Originally posted by: Zap
Anand did a preview with some benchies.

Originally posted by: masteryoda34
Whats up with the slow sustained write speeds on the Intel drives?

According to the preliminary benchmarks, while it has pretty low sequential writes, the random writes are better than anything else. Basically everything else pushes big numbers until the controller gets busy, then they get bogged down.

So, looks like there is still no single "best" MLC drive. With low sequential writes, installing or copying stuff to the drive would be slower than a VelociRaptor by 33%.

The Intel SLC drive has all the strengths of the Intel MLC drive without the weakness of low sequential writes. I'm wondering if Intel did this intentionally?

Those are all the rumors. I'm hoping someone like Anand will address them.

 

[n7]

80 GB showed up on .ca but is now deactivated as it's outta stock no doubt.
160 GB hasn't shown up on the .ca site yet...

 

[ArizonaSteve]

Amazon has them in stock. Bit pricey @ $250 though...

 

[ochadd]

Does Newegg typically deactivate like this. They were out of stock all morning. I need one of these.

 

[rcpratt]

I'm not sure why they are now labeled as deactivated. I wonder if they sold out the 160GB, too? That would be...impressive.

 

[solofly]

Newegg.ca had them for 260 bucks (that's Canadian bucks) which is very attractive. I'll be getting two 80gig drives on October 22 if you know what I mean...

 

[jkresh]

ochadd, haven't seen newegg deactivate stuff too often, but sometimes when it goes out of stock quickly and too many people are asking to be notified of when it comes back then this happens. I would suspect they will have stock ban in within the next week or so (probably picking one up (not sure 80 or 160 or 120gb vertex) before windows 7 rtm to technet)

 

[postmortemIA]

newegg deactivated both drives

perhaps they have critical hardware issue?