Micron's fast, low(er)$$ 256GB SSD

udaman

Wannabe Storage Freak
Joined
Sep 20, 2006
Messages
1,209
http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/08/05/micron.realssd.256gb/

All well and good to produce drives that are faster than almost any deskstop HD equivalent. Problem is as usual, low cost is in the eye of the purchaser. The MLC C200 series has spec's that beat Samsung's rumored intro of a 256GB SSD later this year, but will Micron's beat Samsung's price? Lexar isn't known for being a low price leader.

Several thousand $ for 250MB/s R/W is fine for enterprise markets, but not consumer level. Need 512GB SSD's at only max. 2x HD's price before any significant consumer interest will materialize, IMHO.

Hmm, the SATA-IO better hurry up with SATA 6Gb/s spec, as these new SSD's are near the theoretical bandwidth limit of SATA 3Gb/s- by the end of this year.
 

Chewy509

Wotty wot wot.
Joined
Nov 8, 2006
Messages
3,327
Location
Gold Coast Hinterland, Australia
On the IO front, how may consumer grade systems could handle these new SSDs to their full potential? IMO, not many.

SATA and SAS are now 3Gb (or 300MB/s) per link to the chipset. But then what's between the southbrige chipset (or HBA) and main memory where you want the data?

Often a slow arse connection...

HyperTransport is still only 2GB/s (1GHz @ 16bit) at maximum, not including bus overheads... (And Intel won't have anything to match until it releases QPI in about 6mths). Throw 4 of those SSDs that can do 250MB/s to the controller, crap, you need 1GB/s to main memory... Most current consumer chipsets and HBAs struggle on this throughput, let alone having to deal with LAN, GFX, and general IO (especially if its USB originated) at the same time.

But I do look forward to the wide spread of SSDs in the consumer market.
 
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