Tuesday 15 September 2009

Intel SSD Generational Shift – Performance/Part Number Ordering Considerations

While researching our purchase of Intel SSD drives, the plethora of part numbers for what seems to be the same product needed to be sorted out.

Here is the product grid from Intel’s Solid State Drive page (Intel Partner Site):

image

Now, SSD drive technology has been known to have issues out of the box with performance degradation over time:

Intel’s performance grid also from the Intel Reseller site:

image

It seems that the second generation 34nm products are showing themselves to be a vast improvement over the 50nm first generation products:

Okay, so how do we figure out what product is in which generation?

Let’s have a look at one of our supplier’s pricing grid:

image

Note that the pricing reflects what we see in the actual grid.

Now, the listing is essentially for the same product. An 80GB Intel X25-M SSD.

But, two things stand out in the grid:

  • Obviously one version is less expensive than the other.
  • The less expensive items have a product code of xxxxG2C1 or xxxxG2R5.

In the product part number, the G2 near the end of the part number indicates the generation, second or 34nm version, of the Solid-State Drive.

Keep this in mind when considering an order for Intel SSDs. The newer generation drives deal with the fragmentation issue and are less expensive.

The catch is, at this time we need to wait for at least a couple of weeks or more before the G2 product is available. That may be too long for those that require the products now.

We still see a lot of first generation, G1xx, product stock with our various suppliers, so some may be a bit leery of stocking the newer generation products at a lesser price.

Intel’s public product site:

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*All Mac on SBS posts will not be written on a Mac until we replace our now missing iMac! (previous blog post)

Windows Live Writer

1 comment:

stryqx said...

The Anandtech articles overall are really good, but the recent ones on SSDs have been exceptional.

I've been recommending the X25-M to people who are prepared to spend the money, while the OCZ Vertex is a good value drive.