Postville Refresh 160gb.

[idata]

Anxiously awaiting the release date of the new Postville Refresh SSD 160gb.

Does anyboby know when the release is planned?

thanks.

[idata]

Could also be that the release has been delayed, to ensure old stocks are sold.

[idata]

Well, considering that Intel just released two new G2 series SSDs, the X-25V 40GB, and the X-25M 120 GB models, you wouldn't think so.

The current G2 models have been discounted a bit now but not enough to be considered "shelf clearing" prices. So who knows?

Intel doesn't update their SSD product line constantly, in contrast to other SSD manufactures whose products were found wanting by the hardware review web sites in late 2009 and early 2010. Intel is much more professional and doesn't dump products that aren't truly ready for the marketplace.

Currently, the competition is much greater as the other manufactures are producing good to great products, so Intel is making sure their products will be competitive in that market, I would imagine. Frankly, they need to do that if they want to regain their once preeminent position in the SSD market. Not that their current products are bad, they are simply no longer the king of the hill.

[idata]

Good post parsec, Intel isn't a small 100-person SSD firm like Indilinx or SandForce. The other big companies that produce NAND, controllers, and SSDs are Samsung and Toshiba. You do not see many reviews about their SSDs either. Samsungs newest SSD controller is actually quite good but they have been absolutely terrible at marketing it. Smaller firms are more agile by their nature. They develop controllers and get an OEM like OCZ to test it for them.

BTW, I think Intel is more than capable of dropping their SSD prices. First is the fact that they are producing the NAND for many other companies through IMFT. Intel must be getting a discount from their NAND production. Another case is the Kingston 40GB V-Series Boot Drive. Kingston came out with this drive over a year ago for $80-100. Intel later came out with the 40GB X25-V which is the same drive except with TRIM via firmware. Intel was charging $140 for it. The X25-V goes for $80-90 today but one has to think how Kingston was charging the same price a year ago when NAND was much more expensive.

[idata]

Thanks Duckie, and thanks for the info on Indilinx and SandForce, I did not know they were that small (no offense), rather surprising.

Yes, I can't recall seeing an advertisement for Samsung or Toshiba SSDs, unless I've just been blinded by all the OCZ, Crucial, and Corsair ads (no offense guys, market away!) Are they afraid to send their products to hardware review web sites? I would think their products are beyond what happened with AnandTech and the early OCZ and other SSDs.

I have seen comments elsewhere regarding Intel's ability to drop prices, given what you said. Then again, if a manufacture drops it's prices, will the retailers as well? I purchased an i7-930 CPU for a much lower price than the usual best on line retailers were charging for them (they are all gone now it seems.) The on line retailer that sold me the '930 now has i7-950's for about the same price, while the other retailers are still higher. The case you mentioned with the Intel-produced Kingston SSD is a great point, although I still wonder about any absolute correlation between wholesale and retail pricing.

We may need to wait for the G3's to appear before the G2 prices are lowered to clear the stock. Frankly, my G2's work so well now that a cheap G2 would be quite tempting even with G3's besting them in performance.

Then again, the price drop may never happen. Check the prices on higher-end socket 775 Core 2 Duo and Quads these days, they are virtually unchanged from the prices they were a year ago or more! Or is that like expecting a brand new car that is a year old to be half price, the cost to produce it did not change, so a large price drop simply means low profit, and unlikely to happen.

The relatively long wait for the G3s does not surprise me. As well as not being as agile as small companies as you mentioned, I believe Intel wants to be sure the G3s are a great product. Unfortunately, it still seems that sequential read and write speeds are the only marketing factors that are important in SSDs, and add to that the frenzy for SATA 3 speed and support/compatibility, Intel is stuck attempting to accomplish two things at once. One is improving the performance in areas that actually do make a difference, such as IOPs, 4K random reads and writes, low latency, NAND longevity, or controller and garbage collection optimization, while having the SSDs do sequential reads at over 300MBs in a synthetic benchmark for the hardware tests and advertisements. As we (ought) to know, those two things don't go together easily. I do not envy the SSD engineers! Good luck to them!

[idata]

Hi Parsec, I agree very strongly with your last paragraph. I don't think people understand how fast SSD's are already. Faster sequential speeds can be achieved very easily by just going to raid 0, it's simply a case of spending money. That is not the case with other, more pertinent, performance criteria.

I know that a faster SSD will not make any significant difference to my desktop experience, so I'm not prepared to pay a premium anymore for something that is technically faster but delivers no tangible benefit.

That is probably why Intel chose not to provide TRIM for G1 drives. TRIM was the only real differentiator between G1 and G2 drives.

Cost, reliability and durability are now the key issues for me. Intel has always delivered on the later two, but not on cost and this is where I hope that G3's will deliver.

Although Intel have invested billions in NAND via IMFT the NAND market is now huge. Whilst the percentage of NAND used for SSD's is quite small they must have made a good return on their investment already, so a significant price drop seems to be in order.

It will be interesting to see the price of the 600GB G3's. I can't see people paying the equivalent of a good laptop/ pc for a 600GB hard drive. You might as well stick to a small SSD for boot and buy a large capacity HDD for cents per GB.