Intel's 34nm SSD twice as fast with small files
Written by Andreas G 22 July 2009 18:55

Last week we learned of the new 34nm Solid State Drives from Intel where the focus was on the new, and lower, prices. Intel has, thanks to more efficient memory manufacturing, been able to lower prices by up to 30% with the first models, 80GB and 160GB. The second generation SSDs from Intel, called 2G, were rumored to bring some performance tweaks and even if we could establish that the maximum read and write speeds were the same, the drives have been further optimized for small file transfers.

The biggest weakness of Solid State Drives are in small file transfers. SSDs with write speeds specified to reach over 200MB/s may not even get over 2MB/s when it comes moving many small 4KB files. Despite the fact that Intel has specified the write speed to 70MB/s with its MLC drives it has been leading in this field. While Intel has achieved over 20MB/s in 4KB tests the closest competitors are stuck at around 8MB/s (Samsung's memory controller).

"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," 

Intel's second generation SSD will use a new memory controller and updated firmware that will offer up to 2.5x better performance with 4KB files (2x for the 80GB models), which should performance at around 40-50MB/s, which is just breathtaking in this context.

How much of an advantage this become in real life use remains to be seen, but the drives have had their access times tuned too. Intel says they are up to 25% faster than the previous generation, which were already quite quick.

With both performance optimizations and better GB/dollar ratio that puts most of the competition to shame, and once again Intel has raised the bar for the SSD industry. We hope to learn more about the new drives and see if they can live up to their potential.

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