Hey all,
Scott here from Intel corporation >.......< aware of what we're doing on the social media front.

"Scott" from Intel Corporation...
Are you authorized to officially speak for the Intel Cororation on behalf of their SSD product line?
If so, please disclose your full name and title at Intel.
Sorry if he comes in here as a rep for intel he has to expect questions like "why no TRIM for G1", especially since pretty much all other manufacturers added TRIM to their drives and continue providing firmware improvements while intel takes a "fvck you, buy the new model instead" attitude. That's an awesome attitude to take if you want to pi$$ off enthusiasts. Seriously - how many people bought a G1 that aren't enthusiasts? And how many would even know how to update it to a TRIM enabled firmware? It would only be the biggest enthusiasts which would probably result in a more favorable reaction to intel's coming to an enthusiast forum like this ...
But with their current attitude, I can only say "fvck intel" and I would recommend buying SSDs from companies like OCZ who take enthusiasts a little more seriously and treat them better.
i think we scared him away
lol I think you guys scared him off o well...
Off Anandtech advertising deleted.
Perknose
Forum Director
-Scott, Intel Corporation
Alright. First of all thank you for dropping in these forums.
Let me ask you this: you're probably aware that performance on SSDs can scale very well because it's capable of doing true parallel I/O, as opposed to HDDs which are fundamentally serial based since they can only do I/O at one location at a time. Even with multiple heads the actuator still is locked to one position; thus HDDs are serial operation devices by nature.
Now the real question: what difficulties do you encounter when trying to scale performance? Couldn't you just release a 256-channel controller for example and push speeds into 1GB/s+ range? As long as you can predict the I/O pattern (sequential pattern; backwards or forwards of logical LBA), you should not have issues with insufficient queue depth. Upon two contiguous I/O requests you could assume the pattern is sequential and thus apply internal read-ahead to make sure all channels are busy.
So in my mind, i cannot see the reason Intel isn't pushing speeds against the interface limits. The Intel controller with SRAM cache (i believe 256KiB?) in X25-M does a very impressive job at latency and i still think its the best controller around these days even though SandForce and Micron are serious rivals when looking at both sequential and IOps performance.
Would Intel be looking more at PCI-express as interface instead? Why doesn't Intel build a platform on PCI-express where Intel delivers the PCI-express card with Intel native PCI-e to NAND-controller to the customer, and the customer can insert NAND to the PCIe controller much like SO-DIMM. So you could start with 2x 64GiB NAND and the controller will be able to do I/O faster when you add more NAND modules to the PCIe card.
If someone is capable of building such a platform, it would be Intel. High-performance storage would always be in demand, and Intel already has a head-start as it can build good native controller chips of its own.
Last question: ever considered integrating HPA mapping tables stored in DRAM memory chip to on-die SRAM in the controller-chip itself? Howmuch space would be needed and how big would the impact be on random I/O workloads?
That's all i can think of right now.
Thanks for your time! I highly appreciate and commend your efforts of posting on these forums.
Sub.mesa,
Sorry it took me a bit to get to this question! I've been busy...
Anyway, with regards to your question about architecture and a 256 channel controller, just keep in mind that that many channels would take up valuable real estate and cost money.
As for your question about pushing I/O interface limits, we are in fact doing that. Our drives are getting around 250MB/s read times against the ~300MB/s limit (with some overhead).
With regards to the PCIe comment...
http://storage-news.com/2009/09/27/idf-intel-shows-pci-express-ssd-solution-reaching-1-million-iops/
Hope some of this is helpful! Sorry I can't get into more specifics about drive architecture (I'm sure you understand)
-Scott, Intel Corporation
Nice - observe how he avoids all the questions that were not so "convenient" for the company. E.g. lacking TRIM for first gen drives.
I have an 80GB G1 sitting around... it is actually a fine drive with some extra space as dedicated free space and the fact it is used on a system with very little writing. All user files get written to the network so the only writes are program installation (once every three months), update installation (often but usually not huge), and the random OS/ program writing that happens. Still, when launching programs and booting I get great speed. At 80GB storing user files on the network is almost a requirement so it works out.
Just a thought.
