Has anyone else seen the reviews for these drives coming out? They are a plain joke.
Joke? I guess that depends on your needs. The 320 is in their mainstream series (G3 - replacement for G2/310). If you think that 4x the capacity is a joke, that's up to you. I know that the new Intel 600GB SSD I put into my laptop is about as fast as the Intel 160GB SSD it replaced, and the upgrade was relatively painless. I also know that the additional space offered is critical to allowing me to do my work.
That doesn't sound like a "joke" to me.
As for the peak transfer rates, those are a joke on all drives. The number of applications that actually allow the disk to stream large numbers of sequential sectors is relatively small. As the SSD ages, and the free space fragments, fewer large files are written as contiguous, which makes peak transfer rate even more meaningless. A more important metric is IOPS. Intel seems to be holding their own on that point. Not industry leading, but near the top.
Also, it's important to note that, as per
this paper (published late last year), Intel SSDs have an annualized failure rate of
<0.6%, as compared to the other major players in the SSD market, with annualized failure rates in the 2-3% range. According to
AnandTech, these values have been verified by a few companies. Intel is pleased with these numbers; the others ... not so much. I'm sorry, but, given the choice, I'll take reliable any day.
I'm actually quite confused how they are marketing these as a new SSD.
Perhaps due to the significantly increased capacity, or the new flash chips, made with a 25nm process. I believe the controller is essentially the same as the G2, with updates to handle the larger address space.
Of course, their controller is what sets the Intel mainstream drives apart from the rest of the pack. Considering how good their controller is, I don't think there's much they could change to make it better, without sacrificing the long-term reliability.
Sandy Bridge doesn't offer anything I find interesting over 1336 and this new drives is lame.
FYI, Intel doesn't HAVE a 1336 socket.
If you mean the
LGA-1366 socket, then you should be informed that the major gains are: Lower power consumption, Lower cost CPUs, Lower cost MBs, Faster CPU clocks, and improved vector capabilities. The losses are: fewer PCI-E channels, slightly lower memory bandwidth and (until the 8GB UDIMMs hit the market) 33% lower maximum memory capacity for single-socket MBs.
Of course, the LGA-1155 is a replacement for the LGA-1156 Mainstream CPU, offering improvements on it in just about every way, and NOT a replacement for the LGA-1366 Enthusiast CPU. Even at that, I expect the enhancements delivered are enough to convince most people in the market for a new LGA-1366 that an LGA-1155 is worth looking at.