Hello -
We received your order for an Intel X25-M Gen 2 SSD, and unfortunately, there's a
problem brewing! I left you a voicemail earlier, but I wanted to follow up to give
you full information about what is going on. We got the drives in this morning as
scheduled, but as we were preparing to ship it out, we got a call from Intel asking
us to hold our shipments, as they are issuing a product recall!
They haven't been able to tell us much yet, but what they've said is that there is a
BIOS flaw, in which if you update "the password", the data on the drive is lost.
What we're trying to get more information on is what "password" they're talking
about. If it is a drive-level encryption feature, then it might not affect many
people. If it is a OS password, it will effect a LOT of people. So, if you're OK
sitting tight, I should have more information later today, or on Monday.
Intel did also offer the Gen 1 drives at the same reduced price, so if that's
something you're interested in, I wanted to make you aware of that option.
I just got final word from Intel. It indeed is only a problem when using
drive-level encryption. Even better, it will be fixed with a firmware flash
you can do yourself, which will be released in about two weeks.
Alternately, we can wait those two weeks, and flash it for you before
shipping. Your call! We can actually still ship the drive today if I hear
back within the next half hour or so. Just let me know!
QFT, random writes are soo much more important for speed when installing anything.Originally posted by: 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.
Originally posted by: hammermill
Glad to hear the deactivated part meant it became too popular and not a hardware issue as postmortemIA mentioned, lol.
Got the 80gb version last night from newegg. Stated as "Shipped" this morning, but still no UPS tracking number.
I read for most ssd you need to do some specific steps when formatting ssd drives (from the OCZ forums), offset and such. Same for these Intel drives? ..I plan to use WinXP w/SP3
Originally posted by: jor8888
I bought one !!!
How do I setup for WinXP? DO I follow the instruction for OCZ Vertex? thx.
This is the info I found: http://www.ocztechnologyforum....up_Windows_on_a_VERTEX
Originally posted by: ochadd
Does Newegg typically deactivate like this. They were out of stock all morning. I need one of these.
Originally posted by: taltamir
Originally posted by: ochadd
Does Newegg typically deactivate like this. They were out of stock all morning. I need one of these.
deactivated on newegg TYPICALLY means out of stock.
On high demand items they will activate several times a day as new stock arrives, then deactivate as it is sold out.