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Intel’s SSD technology is looking great
Author: Tim SmalleyPublished: 9th June 2008
All has been quite on the Intel SSD front since IDF Shanghai in April, but the company has revealed more out at Computex.
The first system that Intel demonstrated was a Home Theatre PC based on the newly-released G45 chipset, which featured one of Intel’s SSD drives.
What was interesting about this demonstration was that Intel had turned the monitor off before we entered the hotel suite – I had no idea the machine was powered up until Intel’s representatives turned the screen on to reveal the system playing a high-definition video. The machine was inaudible in what was a pretty quiet hotel room and, even with my ear to the top of the chassis, I couldn’t make out much noise. Maybe I had gone deaf.
The second demonstration we were shown was a little more direct – Intel had kitted out a machine with an overclocked quad-core (eight-thread) Nehalem processor and a pair of Intel SSDs in RAID 0. The system was incredibly responsive, but given the CPU architecture and overclock—which we were told was in double digit percentages—we were a little sceptical about the system responsiveness.
François Piednoel, senior performance analyst at Intel, understood our concerns and fired up his Penryn-based notebook, which was kitted out with a 2.6GHz processor and an Intel SSD drive. He booted up from cold and started firing applications up, and they just reacted almost instantaneously – Word 2007, Excel 2007 and Photoshop all loaded up noticeably quicker than we’ve ever seen before. To say it put an end to our scepticism is a bit of an understatement – this was impressive.
But Piednoel wasn’t finished – he fired up his anti-virus software and watched it scan through his 160GB hard drive in about 16 minutes. “Anti-virus scanning is traditionally limited by the hard drive – but not in this scenario,” he said. “This is the first time an anti-virus application has become processor limited.” He went onto say that he believes that Intel SSDs will help to make computers more secure, as a lot of people don’t scan their systems regularly because it takes too long. I’m not sure about the last bit, but his proof of concept demo was almost jaw dropping – I’ve never seen virus scanning working this fast before.
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Comments (16)
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I want SSD... CHEAP, MORE GB and I want it NOW!
anyway, things are looking good for the SSD front, more competition may result in a faster adaptation and price drops of SSD's
it's going to be a long while before I invest in SSD
The day a 32 GB SSD hits <=£100 inc VAT is the day my OS leaves the mechanical domain permanently.