IDF – Power efficient, speedy storage

Rounding out the announcements at IDF, Intel made a formal foray into the Solid State Disk (SSD) space.

If you can cast your mind back a couple of years, you will remember that SSDs were nothing more that a dream, one that wasn’t likely to come true because of flash memory being ridiculously more expensive than magnetic disk.

But then flash-based thumb drives caught on and this industry began gaining the economies of scale to change all that.

Although flash is still ‘megabyte for megabyte’ much more expensive than magnetic disk, it’s getting cheaper – so cheap in fact that the past year has seen solid state disks making their way into Apple’s Macbook Air and Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300 to name but two notebooks.

Intel now has two models available in the market – a 1.8-inch, 80GB drive called the X18-M and a 2.5-inch unit with the same capacity known as the X25-M.

And judging by the fact that the 160GB models based on these designs are already sampling in the market, users can expect to see Intel drives with double the current capacity in the market early next year.

Just how much will one of these components cost? Well, the 80GB models (regardless of form factor) will apparently sell at $595 each, in quantities of 1000 or less.

While it’s still a bit pricey, we can expect prices to continue coming down.

Currently there’s about a 5x to 7x price premium for an SSD, but Samsung (backed by DataQuest research) estimates that the price premium will drop to 3x in the next year and a half.

Since it’s pretty much a given that the vendors likely to integrate these drives into their solutions will negotiate this price down a great deal (by ordering large volumes), end-users can expect to pay a couple of extra Grand for SSD equipped notebook.

What does that extra cash get you?

The short answer is a ton of extra performance. Currently, the 80GB drive achieves up to 250MB per second read speeds and up to 70MB per second write speeds with a low 85-microsecond read latency.
Comparatively, a high-performing drive (such as Western Digital’s VelociRaptor) delivers a read and write speed of about 125MB per second.

Intel is also pitching SSD into the server space really hard, since it has huge benefits to offer in terms of performance and reduced power consumption.

Its X25-E Extreme SATA SSD, designed expressly for servers is sampling now in a 32GB capacity and will soon be sampling at 64GB.

At 32GB, it achieves up to 250MB per second read speeds and up to 170MB per second write speeds with an even lower 75-microsecond read latency.

According to Intel, this drive also features a 2m-hour mean time before failure and consumes 2.4 Watts of power when being used. When its idle this drops to 0.06 Watts, which the vendor says results in a 70% energy saving over the lifetime of the product.