The Solid State Drive market has really bloomed this year and we have seen several major harddrive and memory manufacturers venture on to the SSD market. When Intel announced that it would also launch Solid State Drives many, us included, started to look forward to what the world’s largest semiconductor company would bring to the market. Intel has now officially launched its first SSD, Intel X25-M. As previous reported, this is a multi-level chip (MLC) NAND flash model and as it turns out, Intel has more or less turned the current MLC market upside down through its memory controller and memory chips.
Those of you who have already tested the current generation of MLC SSDs knows that there are quite a lot of drives out there that share technology, sometimes they are even identical under the hood. Multiple drives have also displayed problems when writing smaller files. This has been blamed on the MLC technology since the same problems could not be seen with single-level chip (SLC) Solid State Drives. But now that Intel gets into the game with its MLC SSD with both own chips and memory controller it turns out that the problems is no related to the MLC technology, but the specific chips and the memory controllers of other MLC models.
Anandtech has published a rather extensive review of Intel X25-M where they really dissect the problems caused by JMicron’s memory controller and in the end means that Intel’s own MLC SSD crushes the opposition, but also the “faster” SLC SSD models and 10,000 RPMs harddrives are having a hard time keeping up.
“As I’ve mentioned before, the random write issues with JMicron JMF602 based MLC SSDs are simply unacceptable and in my opinion they make the drives unusable for use in any desktop or notebook that you actually care about. Next year we may see a JMicron controller that fixes the problem but until then, I’d consider those drives off limits.” – Anandtech
In short, Intel has moved in and showed the world how things are down with X25-M and the only stopping them from taking over is the price, the same problem with all SSDs. Early promotional slides for Intel’s SSD lineup looked exaggerated, but Intel has really shown why Solid State Drive technology is the future and why mechanical drives are about to enter the declining era, at least when it comes to performance. And don’t forget, Intel has not even released the SLC models yet…
“While Intel was light on details about the tricks they implemented in their controller, it’s clearly enough to completely change the way we look at MLC SSD performance. And if this is the sort of performance we can expect out of its MLC drive, I’m wondering what will happen when we look at its SLC drives.” – Anandtech
We’ve gathered a couple of reviews of Intel’s X25-M SSD below and we can really recommend the article over at Anandtech for those who want a better insight into how Solid State Drives work and the problems of many MLC models.
:: Anandtech :: HotHardware :: TechReport :: PC Perspective :: Legit Reviews ::
