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]

Hi redux, thanks and Happy New Year!

Now this is an interesting (and bold) statement:

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

So no advantage going from 50nm to 32nm? I'm realizing that I don't know what the performance numbers for G1s are, but if they are close to G2s, then you've made a good point. To purposely withhold TRIM from G1 SSDs seems to me to be a dirty trick, as my friend's grandaughter would say, "not nice". Let's be sure to say here that we do not know that is the case. But wait...

And, and, and, TRIM did not exist until Windows 7! G1s pre-date Windows 7. Never mind...

It is irritating to me that the hardware review web sites still list sequential read and write speeds before everything else in tests, and do not do a good enough job, IMO, in making the point that sequential speeds are not the most important aspect of SSD performance, or of any type of permanent storage, for most users. Or the "my PC is faster than your PC" crowd chooses to ignore that. Just like I need to OC my i7-9xx CPU for web surfing and email, while my ISP has yet to reach 100Mbps, over my 1Gbps home network.

Your comments about pricing are right on. X-25M G2 80GB SSD were introduced at $595, and I've never paid more that $200 for one (nor would have) but things have changed now. So the G3s may be somewhat pricey at their introduction, but that will fall afterwards. Then again, the SSD market is competitive now, so the prices ought to be "in the ballpark". Also, in the HDD world, I read that a manufacture has a new process that may allow HDDs to have a capacity over 10TB. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Still, Intel's investment in NAND fabrication (Billions) can hardly be paid for yet, but that is an investment in the future. We may even see the day when Intel does not market SSDs, but simply sells the NAND chips to others.

[idata]

Going from 50nm to 32nm actually had a negative effect on write cycles. The smaller the process, the increase leakage and degradation.

There was some minor performance gain from G1 to G2 but TRIM is the big difference.

IMFT has been selling NAND to other companies for years now. Some batches of the OCZ Agility 1 used IMFT 32nm NAND.

[idata]

Duckie, Interesting about the 50nm vs 32nm thing, I did not know that.

So the obvious question is, why then go to 25nm flash, if it will have more of the negative affect of simply being smaller? I guess it's not that much of a problem, it is compensated for, or the problem has been reduced or fixed. I have three PCs with Intel X-25M 80GB SSDs for the OS, and I have not had the slightest bit of trouble or glitch with them (knock on silicon.) I take them for granted actually, and one has Vista (gasp!) installed on it and it runs just as fast as my Win 7 PCs do.

A friend who is not a PC enthusiast has a lower-end pre-built PC with Vista on a HDD. I was helping him with some new hardware, just optical drives, and we had to reboot his PC. It took for-ever, I could not believe it, I thought there was a problem. Sure all he had was a Pentium E5200, but the HDD was just cranking away, I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it is a newer large capacity SATA 2 HDD. That's when I remembered the complaints of Vista being slow, but it never has been on my PC.

Cost will be the factor that could bring SSDs more into mainstream PC use. The Apple Air, that super-thin laptop, has an SSD, and as people are impressed with that PC (except for the price) they may actually learn what an SSD is. Most people still don't know what an SSD is, believe me, I talk about them and people have no idea. So, there are many marketing opportunities there.

BTW, is IMFT in the stock market?

[idata]

parsec wrote:

Duckie, Interesting about the 50nm vs 32nm thing, I did not know that.

So the obvious question is, why then go to 25nm flash, if it will have more of the negative affect of simply being smaller? I guess it's not that much of a problem, it is compensated for, or the problem has been reduced or fixed. I have three PCs with Intel X-25M 80GB SSDs for the OS, and I have not had the slightest bit of trouble or glitch with them (knock on silicon.) I take them for granted actually, and one has Vista (gasp!) installed on it and it runs just as fast as my Win 7 PCs do.

A friend who is not a PC enthusiast has a lower-end pre-built PC with Vista on a HDD. I was helping him with some new hardware, just optical drives, and we had to reboot his PC. It took for-ever, I could not believe it, I thought there was a problem. Sure all he had was a Pentium E5200, but the HDD was just cranking away, I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it is a newer large capacity SATA 2 HDD. That's when I remembered the complaints of Vista being slow, but it never has been on my PC.

Cost will be the factor that could bring SSDs more into mainstream PC use. The Apple Air, that super-thin laptop, has an SSD, and as people are impressed with that PC (except for the price) they may actually learn what an SSD is. Most people still don't know what an SSD is, believe me, I talk about them and people have no idea. So, there are many marketing opportunities there.

BTW, is IMFT in the stock market?

Cost. Smaller processes allow for a larger number of chips per wafer.

IMFT and others will be combating errors with ECC: http://www.anandtech.com/print/4043 http://www.anandtech.com/print/4043

The problem with SSDs is users don't understand the benefits. Users really have to experience one first hand to "feel" how nice it is to have one.

As for IMFT, I don't believe you can purchase shares of this joint venture: http://www.imftech.com/company/faqs.html# ownership http://www.imftech.com/company/faqs.html# ownership

What is the ownership structure of IM Flash?

Micron owns 51 percent of the company and Intel owns 49 percent. The venture is a consolidated Micron subsidiary with a joint Micron-Intel management team.

[idata]

Thanks for the info Duckie, I appreciate it.

And now it make sense to me, IMFT: Intel Micron Flash Technology

But it seems they like to call themselves, IM Flash... nice pun!

And made in the USA too, time to move to Utah!!