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Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES [Wednesday 22 July 2009]
Intel has announced a new lineup of NAND flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) that utilize 34nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory, and said the move to the more-advanced process will help lower prices of the SSDs by up to 60% thanks to the reduced die size and advanced engineering design.
The Intel X25-M mainstream SATA SSDs come in standard 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch sizes, and are available in 80GB and 160GB versions. The new SSDs will begin shipping on 34nm flash memory later in the third quarter of 2009, according to the company.
"Our goal was to not only be first to achieve 34nm NAND flash memory lithography, but to do so with the same or better performance than our 50nm version," said Randy Wilhelm, Intel vice president and general manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group.
Intel said its new X25-M on 34nm is drop-in compatible with the current 50nm version, and offers improved latency and faster random write inputs/outputs per second (IOPS). Compared to approximately 4,000 microseconds for a hard disk drive (HDD), the new 34nm SSD operates at 65-microsecond latency and provides a 25% reduction in latency.
Random write performance increases twofold, further separating the X25-M from other competing SSDs, according to Intel. It delivers up to 6,600 4KB write IOPS and 35,000 read IOPS, compared to HDDs that only operate at several hundred IOPS.
New channel prices for the X25-M 80GB are US$225 for quantities up to 1,000 units (a 60% reduction from the original introduction price of US$595 a year ago), and the 160GB version is US$440 (down from $945 at introduction), according to Intel.
In addition, Intel noted its new SSD will also support Microsoft Windows 7 with a firmware update. The upcoming OS is scheduled to release in October.
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2. Intel’s X25-E SSD Walks All Over The Competition
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The first solid state drive by Intel was the mainstream X25-M, which we reviewed last September. It is available in capacities of 80 GB and 160 GB, and its performance and power efficiency set new standards for desktop systems and notebooks. However, since it is based on MLC flash memory, its write throughput and I/O performance generally aren't considered suitable for servers and workstations. That all changes with the introduction of the X25-E SLC-based SSD.
X25-M/X25-E: Why Two SSDs?
There are two different types of flash memory on the market: multi-level cell (MLC) and single-level cell (SLC). MLC stores multiple bits of data in each flash memory cell, making it less expensive. SLC costs much more, but allows direct access to each bit of data, which enables better performance for random access and write operations.
Let me give you an example: the X25-M, which has been Intel’s desktop flash SSD product, reaches a level of 200 MB/s in read throughput, but it only writes at up to 75 MB/s. And although it provides great I/O performance, an SLC-based flash SSD can do much better.
Enterprise Requirements
Enterprise customers typically require as many I/O operations per second as possible in order to sustain the minimum number of transactions per second required by mission-critical applications. In this context, Intel paired its excellent flash controller with SLC memory. The result is amazing, as the X25-E drive simply leaves its competition in the dust.
We compared it to the X25-M, a Samsung 64 GB mainstream flash SSD, server SSDs from Mtron and Memoright, and the two fastest 15,000 RPM hard drives you can get: the Hitachi Ultrastar 15K450, and Seagate’s Cheetah 15K.6.
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Conclusion
If you took the time to flip through all of the benchmark pages, then you probably won’t need to read this conclusion to know what we're going to say. Intel’s first SSD, the X25-M, which aims at the premium desktop and mobile market, was already impressive. It still dominates many benchmarks, pairing high performance with great efficiency. But the X25-E is something different altogether.
Performance Madness
The new device is based on the same controller and cache memory architecture. It does not provide more maximum throughput than the X25-M (200 MB/s), and it is limited to 32 GB and 64 GB capacities for now. But it offers serious write performance (160 MB/s) thanks to single level cell flash memory, which the mainstream drive doesn’t possess. More importantly, it introduces I/O performance that is 10x to 25x higher than what you can get from the latest 15,000 RPM server hard drives. In almost every I/O benchmark, except the Web server test, the X25-E is three to five times faster than its direct flash SSD competitors.
Revealing the Inefficient
Describing the X25-E as the most efficient server drive would be correct, but I prefer to endorse it as the flash SSD storage product that finally redefines server storage performance, and resets the standards for high I/O devices. It isn’t so much more efficient than hard drives, but hard drives are simply extremely inefficient when it comes to random workloads.
Sophisticated flash memory technology has reached a level at which a single storage product is capable of delivering performance levels formerly reached only on complex RAID arrays with 6-12 hard drives. Not only does it outperform those good old hard drives, but this single X25-E storage product does it while consuming only a bit more than 1 W, on average, compared to at least 100 W for a RAID array.
This doesn’t mean that the hard drive is going to disappear, of course. High capacity applications and fast throughput remain an undisputed domain of magnetic storage products. But the days of hard drives being used in I/O intensive server applications are numbered. Hitachi and Seagate had better do their homework before releasing their flash SSD products in late 2009 or 2010, as Intel has set the bar higher than it has ever been before in the server storage market.
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RMG and Associates 
