Has anyone else seen the reviews for these drives coming out? They are a plain joke. I'm actually quite confused how they are marketing these as a new SSD. I think Intel is hitting a slump. Sandy Bridge doesn't offer anything I find interesting over 1336 and this new drives is lame.
Intel 320 SSD
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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.Has anyone else seen the reviews for these drives coming out? They are a plain joke.
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.
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.I'm actually quite confused how they are marketing these as a new SSD.
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.
FYI, Intel doesn't HAVE a 1336 socket.Sandy Bridge doesn't offer anything I find interesting over 1336 and this new drives is lame.
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.
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I myself own Intel SSD's due to perceived reliability. I was not criticising any of the points you mentioned. My statement was about how they are releasing a new drive and it doesn't appear to offer much over the last generation. The prices are not anywhere near as low as they were rumored to be. As far as I recall the random numbers are lower than the G2 in some cases. And it is the exact same controller as the G2. Yeah it's cool to have 600 GB drives but only for a fraction of a percent of the computer using population. I could see this working if the drives were considerably cheaper but they aren't. They are priced competitively. They are going to have to make the statistics on reliability much more clear if they intend to keep on top.
SB does offer some small improvements but clock for clock it doesn't make much of a difference. Maybe I have a one sided view there as all I really use raw CPU horse power for is encoding video and there hasn't really been any improvements there.
SB does offer some small improvements but clock for clock it doesn't make much of a difference. Maybe I have a one sided view there as all I really use raw CPU horse power for is encoding video and there hasn't really been any improvements there.
You know there may be better options, ie. discrete video cards.Maybe I have a one sided view there as all I really use raw CPU horse power for is encoding video and there hasn't really been any improvements there.
I use the Xilisoft Soft HD encoder and it supports ATI and Nvidia video cards. With a lower-end mainstream discrete video card, I'd say it's probably 2-4x faster than my Intel quadcore (1st gen) @ 3.2GHz.
With SB products and Quicksync, there might be some significant improvements there. We'll have to wait for new software to come out.
You can try the demo. I encode HD with and older version of this program and if I remember correctly, it does support x.264 via GPU.
http://www.xilisoft.com/video-converter.html
http://www.xilisoft.com/video-converter.html
I just finished putting together my X3-1240 and as a comparison between CPU vs GPU encoding for X.264, the GPU encoding is about 2x as fast. This is with a Radeon 4870According to the X264 developers there is no benefit to adding GPU encoding to their encoder. GPU decoding on the other hand is proving to be very beneficial.
http://www.xilisoft.com/cuda.html