What is Digg?Sponsored by Travelzoo
Take Advantage of Ridiculously Low Holiday Airfares view!
travelzoo.com - Flights $52 and up for Thanksgiving, Christmas & New Year. But move on it now.
38 Comments
- Lucas123, on 03/12/2009, -0/+20While this, and probably no other SSD anytime soon, will beat Intel's X-25M consumer flash drive for speed, who cares? The OCZ still has blazing fast speed with max reads of 230 MB/sec and writes to 160 MB/sec. and it has 40GB more capacity than Intel's and costs about $50 less online.
- DiscoLando, on 03/13/2009, -0/+19Competition... music to the tech enthusiasts ears!
- inactive, on 03/13/2009, -0/+12English *****, do you speak it?
- Xazos, on 03/12/2009, -0/+11Value for money, good stuff ;)
- Carbuncle84, on 03/13/2009, -0/+9I'm really looking forward to the future of SSDs. It seems the only thing holding computers back these days from a huge performance leap is the old mechanical hard drives they use.
- Ricochetbiscuit, on 03/13/2009, -0/+7One word - huh?
- ileftfark, on 03/12/2009, -0/+6In a "pseudo-RAID0" configuration, does the loss of a single controller necessarily mean the loss of both? With the speed of innovation in SSD technology, it may be worth the storage to do a RAID5 or even 6, especially in the enterprise world. Anyone know?
- itsradBrad, on 03/13/2009, -0/+5Sounds cool, most of us will be holding out for larger drives and cheaper prices though.
It's nice to see the tech moving along. - jonathanseely, on 03/12/2009, -0/+5Thats really cool to see... can def. see applications in low energy netbooks etc.
- vsujohn2, on 03/13/2009, -0/+4WTF?
- pacopaitz, on 03/13/2009, -0/+4OCZ Vertex is a much better drive than the Apex. Much higher I/O, lower access times, and way faster write speeds. It also has integrated cache which fixes the stuttering issues that occur in most non-intel ssds. http://tinyurl.com/cpabss
- toastgodsupreme, on 03/13/2009, -0/+4Still not exactly affordable for every day consumer use. Kind of limited to a niche market.
Oh well, years from now we'll have our Raid5 internal 200Gb SSDs that do 500mb/s for $50 and we'll all be going "wow, I can't believe these used to cost so much." - chongli, on 03/13/2009, -0/+4It's a single device. A partial failure of any single device is bad, this is no different. Unless it has a higher failure rate, I don't see it as a problem. Just take multiple drives and do the RAID5 yourself.
What good is a RAID5 internally in this device if you cannot take it apart and replace a failed controller or drive? - blackmesa, on 03/13/2009, -0/+4These SSDs are pretty interesting tech, but I'd like to know what kind of lifespan and reliability they have.
USB drives will lose their contents after a number of years (I've seen 10 years quoted by one manufacturer), and I remember reading notes to the effect that you get about 10,000 read/write operations before they stop working right. I'd assume a 120GB drive would have higher manufacturing quality, but do the same weaknesses faced by USB drives apply? - dhughes, on 03/13/2009, -0/+3 I'm disappointed, it seems all the SSD drives are MLC, even the Intel X25-M,I don't think I've seen an SLC type. I'd love to get an SSD but from what I've read there is an enormous difference in lifespan between the two (5 years versus 100 years).
- FoxRacR17, on 03/13/2009, -1/+4Its not about MB/s, its about IOPS. The x25-m owns everything on the market because it can handle a MASSIVE amount of IOPS where other drives cannot.
- nrox653, on 03/13/2009, -0/+3Keyboard borked? Carpal tunnel? Wireless keyboard interference?
Nah, I'd call it mental retardation. Lol @ only good for "PowerSave". These things use almost as much power and are much faster than normal drives, so WTF? Stupid kid. - mrsteveman1, on 03/13/2009, -1/+3That makes no sense
- HopeForTomorrow, on 03/13/2009, -0/+2Are you autistic?
- dt40, on 03/13/2009, -0/+2Who cares? Have you tried an X-25-M? Those things are AMAZINGLY fast. For most scenarios, they make a computer feel like it is two or three generations newer. My 2.5-year-old Core 2 Duo laptop with a new X-25-M is MUCH faster than my 2-month-old E8500 build with 4xRAID0 HDDs for most scenarios.
IOPS is indeed what matters for most stuff we do. - mdoverkill, on 03/13/2009, -1/+3The Vertex series is an even faster drive and you still get more capacity than the Intel X-25 drives
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=670 - JQP123, on 03/13/2009, -0/+2"... does the loss of a single controller necessarily mean the loss of both?"
At the very least it means loss of 1/2 the storage capacity and probably the majority of your data. And in this particular case, it most likely means that the disk becomes unusable.
RAID0 is strictly a performance enchancement. Files are broken into pieces and the pieces are simultaneously read from/written to more than 1 drive; hence, the obvious performance enhancment. For example, with 2 drives, perfomance could theoretically double. In the real world, some overhead is required to constantly dis-assemble and re-assemble files so a realistic improvement is more like 1.5X rather than 2X.
Obviously this does not offer any redundancy or protection against hardware failure. In fact, the chances of failure are actually increased by the number of disks (or disk controllers) involved. - JQP123, on 03/13/2009, -0/+2MTBF = Mean Time Before Failure = 1.5 x 10^6 hours = 62500 days = 171 years
Warranty = 2 years
Something doesn't quite add up here. - dhughes, on 03/13/2009, -0/+2 I see now, the X25-E is SLC and the X25-M is MLC, you'd think they would call it the X25-S but i guess that is too easy :/
- jkroge, on 03/13/2009, -0/+2Here is one SLC drive that is available to consumers: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8 ...
It may be better than MLC, but it is much more expensive. - jcbbigdigger, on 03/31/2009, -0/+1It won't be long before we hit the SATA II transfer limit, how long will it be before SATA III comes out and what will it's specs be?
I'm more for a Fusion-IO setup where you plug your SSD directly in to your PCI-X bus, 700MB/s read 550MB/s write and wear leveling of 24 years assuming 5TB of data written/erased a day. It's only an x4 card too, think of an x16 :-)
It's all a moot subject, I won't be surprised if Intel will do a QuickPath II that has Processor, Memory and SSD all on one 16nm chip. However, that would make upgrading a tricky thing to do! - Diosjenin, on 03/13/2009, -1/+2The Apex has the same internal configuration as (read: identical to) the G-Skill Titan, which was released almost two months ago.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/01/2 ... - Diosjenin, on 03/13/2009, -1/+2Intel's X25-E is probably the best-known one. It's crazy expensive for not much extra performance (over the X25-M), though.
Besides, wear-leveling techniques used on most MLC drives guarantee lifespan far past the 10-year mark, so that much isn't a problem. What *is* a problem on cheaper MLC drives (i.e. for now, anything but the X25-M and ones with internal RAID 0 like the Apex) is stuttering... see the Anandtech article below for details.
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc ... - Emachine, on 03/13/2009, -1/+2x25 also doesn't work with bootcamp for some reason
- headband, on 03/14/2009, -0/+1the drive costs twice as much as your netbook
these things are built for speed and reliability....mainly for servers and power users....not casual web surfers - Drizzit, on 03/13/2009, -0/+1Not really, part of the problem is the SATA has not moved up in speeds. Hopefully SSD drives faster SATA standards.
- mrsteveman1, on 03/13/2009, -2/+3Actually its about reliability over time, hard drives have spinning parts and use highly problematic magnetic media.
Speed means nothing to me if my data isn't safe, and any SSD can reliably store static data i need to keep for a long time. - r00fus, on 03/13/2009, -0/+1200GB?... you mean 2TB, right?
- FoxRacR17, on 03/14/2009, -0/+1Yes traditional HDD's have moving parts, but SSD's have their weakness also. If its an MLC based SSD then it can only perform about 10,000 write/erase cycles before the flash chip dies, and when that happens your data IS NOT recoverable. Where as you might be able to retrieve your data from a HDD.
- fluxion, on 03/13/2009, -2/+2competition being forced to use old tech and raid configurations to come anywhere even close to their numbers.... music ("cha-ching") to intel's ears
- r00fus, on 03/13/2009, -1/+1is Emachine referring to this Anandtech article?
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc ...
Vista didnt' install for him. - mdoverkill, on 03/13/2009, -1/+1What part of cheaper, faster, and more capacity didn't you understand?
Besides the Vertex line of SSDs from OCZ are even better, they use Indilinx controllers so no stuttering.
Ihttp://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=670 - syntaxgs, on 03/13/2009, -21/+1Solid,State,Hard,Disc,Drives has no advantgous over normal har ddisc disc drive becaosue beyond PowerSave it,s not much more then expense costly
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is