back to article New Intel 710: The numbers don't look good

Intel's delayed 710 SSD, its X25-E replacement, has arrived at last, after having been initially outed back in July. It's a fairly standard – for these days – 25nm, 2-bit MLC solid state drive, with 100, 200 and 300GB capacity points. But it has wildly skewed read and write performance and poor-to-average bandwidth numbers. …

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  1. This post has been deleted by its author

    1. Matt Bryant Silver badge
      Happy

      It's an employment boosting technology.

      Many years ago, I worked with a delightful gent who told me his first job as a student was "vavle monkey". That entailed working with one of the original computers back in the '50s, his job being to sit all night in the boiling computer room with a box of valves, ready to leap up and replace any blown valves. He said he could go through a dozen valves in a night, as long as he didn't accidentally electrocute himself in the valve changing process (that could shock you unconcious!). Obviously, Intel is doing the economy a favour and turning the clock back to those good 'ol days, providing employment for thousands as "SSD monkeys" (not to be confused with "tape monkeys", who switch backup tapes for a living).

  2. Paul Crawford Silver badge

    Price/performance

    Figures don't look good - but you fail to mention how its cost stacks up against the Anobit units. Is that not a BIG omission in a review?

    1. ChrisInAStrangeLand

      It's not a review, it's a checkbox comparison. The author has neither part to test to verify manufacturer claims.

  3. MJI Silver badge
    Joke

    710

    Some cars have a 710 cap on the engine

  4. ToddRundgren
    Thumb Down

    Flash suppliers fib

    Shock horror, flash suppliers fib horribly about IOPs. Most use cache numbers rather than flash read/write numbers. They always use numbers from a virgin/new disc, which is often 70& higher than a unit with data on it..

    Maybe Intel is fibbing less than Anobit.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Intel. The x86 company.

    And that is all.

  6. Bernard Mergendeiler
    Alert

    The 710 from 1973 is back!

    Tne now-defunct Wang Laboratories came up with a model 710 disk, too -- 256K fixed and 256K removable, ca 1973. The hardware and electronics were a phenomenal piece of engineering mediocrity, even for that time. One could have done about as well trying to make a disk drove out of a phonograph turntable with the tone arm recycled as head positioner. But,unlike any disk today, it was byte-addressable.

    The Intel 710 article brought it all back in a rush.

    I wonder if they retained the Wang feature of electrostatic formatting. Walk across a carpeted floor, touch the control panel bezel, and watch the drive auto-format both platters.

  7. Jim O'Reilly

    When the original x.25 came out in 2008, I held the SSD World speed record for a couple of months at 39,600 Random Read IOPS. The value of SSD is that huge RR IOPS number, together with a good (50%) random write IOPS, at least out of the box. $/IOPS is important provided the IOPS number is in the ball[park of the leaders.

    SSD is a rapidly evolving business, with plenty of players. Failing to follow something like Moore's Law is a bad thing.

    I must add, however, that the PCIe accelerator class products can beat discrete drives to their knees, performance wise. If local SSD is considered more as a DRAM extender than a disk drive, this is where the action will be. With storage appliances architectures moving to x86 COTS motherboards, the PCIe approach looks to me like a better place for Intel to focus. Perhaps a direct QPI connect flash device might be an even better fit for a storage optimized design.

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