Assessing the power of Intel’s SSD 750 … but check your motherboard before buying Although SSDs have a huge performance advantage over the good, old-fashioned clattering mechanical drive, they have (up till now) been held back because of their reliance on AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) architecture, developed in 2004 for standard disks and, in particular, SATA interfaced disks. Intel SSD750 NVMe …
That implies 124 microseconds for each read. I wonder how that latency divides between the host OS/drivers, the NVMe interface, and the SSD itself.
That's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than DRAM, and it does suggest where flash DIMMs could really shine.
Storage speeds as fast as RAM is definitely the direction things are heading. The idea that the two were once physically separate components will probably be seen as quaint in not too many years.
That said - my inner dinosaur is still trying to rebel - A Hard Disk - on a card? Madness!
>my inner dinosaur is still trying to rebel - A Hard Disk - on a card?
My inner dinosaur looks at that with a hint of nostalgia.
However, I can't help thinking that it would be cheaper / more standardised to run an SSD RAID array, even if you put multiple sata controllers on an x16 card.
Old? you young whippersnapper you.
The first HDD I used came in its own 19in Rack mounting and gave a grand total of 2.4Mb
This was a venerable RK05. It was connected directly to the computer Bus (Dec Unibus).
Ok Intel, drop the price by 50% and I know of a few people who would buy one right away.
2.8" DSDD? 1Mb?
You wur lucky! We 'ad 36" single sided 'alf density disks that wur so 'eavy it took a team of three operators to mount one. T'storage capacity wer nobbut 360kb, and if you forgot to press Ctrl-C you 'ad a BDOS ERR and everybody 'ad to go 'ome for t'rest o' t'day while you rebooted t'system.
2.8" DSDD? 1Mb?You wur lucky! We 'ad 36" single sided 'alf density disks that wur so 'eavy it took a team of three operators to mount one. T'storage capacity wer nobbut 360kb, and if you forgot to press Ctrl-C you 'ad a BDOS ERR and everybody 'ad to go 'ome for t'rest o' t'day while you rebooted t'system.
What's especially scary is that at one point this wasn't far off the case. Although IIRC you'd also have to be careful what terminal you were using when switching drives (i.e. wheeling the damn things across the computer room on a trolly) possibly because of the VT compatibility you'd managed to bodge in place using a paperclip in place of a jumper. And then there was the strange case of that one terminal connection that for some reason, despite having apparently "identical" wiring, would only accept a certain VT... something like VT100 rather than VT102 (this wasn't the master terminal, some arbitrary other connection).
Some things are better left forgotten.
You have me beat. The first disk drive I worked with was an IBM1131, it had 512kb capacity. Goes well with the magnetic donuts strung in wires that made up the 8K RAM of the 1130.
Learned all kinds of bad habits programming on that machine. I still can't shake off trying to optimize the heck out of compute time, RAM and storage requirements, even tho' I now use a PC with 12 cores, running 5000x faster, with 4 million x more RAM, and 4E9 x more disk storage.
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Flash Dimms, aka SansDisk UltraDIMM was sidetracked by lawsuits and the fact that it only worked in DDR3 dimm slots.
I agree that it was an interesting choice and I would imagine that if you did the same with the new RRAM tech from Intel/Micron and Crossbar, you'd have a winner.
This product however is a gap product. It doubles the performance of what was traditionally a SATA SSD.
For a prosumer / consumer product ... it has its limited value. Certain applications will be able to take advantage of it.
For the SOHO small biz, it has even more potential. Now you can get better performance out of a smaller box to serve up your ecommerce site. You can do more with data backed systems where you don't have to buy larger more expensive boxes.
I think we can all see the future, yet not all of us can wait and at a certain price point, we can justify the expense. What we need to see is a new bus architecture to allow for high density RRAM tech.
Imagine having a 2.5" card, the size of your 2.5" SSD slotting in to a bus chassis and being part of a micro super computer?
Smaller, definitely thinner, flexible, credit card size super computer with an extended lifetime of storage to boot for your personal compute environment. And that will be a transition solution until the dinosaurs who won't trust the all pervasive world encompassing immersive experience.
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Serious question. Actually two questions, really...
1) I assume that there are no AMD based motherboards that support it today, but is this Intel board tied in any way to Intel support chips or boards?
2) Does anyone know if AMD and associated MB producers are working on the necessary architectures to support these types of cards? Is NVMe the thing to look for in specs?
I like to do my bit to encourage competition in the processor business, but I don't like missing out on new toys!
The MSI 990FXA board supports NVMe (not sure if there are additional PCIe v3 x4 slots for it though). It's rumoured that much more widespread NVMe support for AMD will arrive with new chipsets in Q4 2015.
Given the price of the buggers I'm happy to wait for 6 months anyway.
A shame the article failed to mention if there's any Linux driver support for this Intel SSD. A quick Google suggests that kernel 3.19 and later has NVMe support, though I'm not sure if recent distros have enabled it or not. It would be nice if El Reg PCIe SSD reviewers even just booted a (very recent) live Linux ISO to see if the drive is recognised - surely that's not asking too much?
Bring the price to where it approaches that of SATA SSDs and I'll be rushing to the store for one... er. clicking to buy one from Amazon or Newegg.
For the average user, even an avid gamer though, the performance of a SATA SSD is still plenty good though. Maybe my boot time would go from 10-12 seconds to 6 seconds. I suppose in time Windows will require an SSD of some sort just as it requires minimum processor specs to offset some of the bloat. I think most people that just surf, get on "The Facebook", etc. will barely note the transition from their standard SSD or MSATA drive to one of these.
Re. floppy drives, my Commodore PET in 1980 would reliably store 1MB using both sides of a floppy and an intelligent (for the time) 8050 floppy drive, a feat it took a long time for IBM and others to match.
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