someone get gigabyte to send me one of these

[farlo]

http://www.gigabyte.com/press-center/news-page.aspx?nid=1027 :santa:

[Munty]

director of marketing for Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group

What in the heck is Non-volatile memory?!? More importantly, what kind of memory do I have??? Is my computer gonna 'splode???

I'm going to look into this a bit, and put this sheet of solid lead between myself and the computer. Very nice looking product though, dibs on the extra if they want to send two :D

[pcclan]

put this sheet of solid lead between myself and the computer.
make sure to wear gloves don't want to get to much lead in your pants lol

[Kayin]

Non-volatile memory means it remembers its state when powered off. Like an SSD, unlike RAM.

[RogueOpportunist]

Neat idea but isn't something like this pretty much pointless for people already using SSD's for their OS drive? It's gonna have to be pretty inexpensive otherwise you might as well just buy a 40gb Intel SSD for 80$ and plug it into your existing 100$ motherboard.

If caching your spindle drive(s) is the only purpose wouldn't you be just as good to keep whatever MB you have and buy some of those Seagate hybrid drives with the SSD cache built right into them?

I dunno about this one, it seems like a re-branded version of the same stuff we already have and considering this is an SLC SSD it's likely gonna be pricey.

[Munty]

Non-volatile memory means it remembers its state when powered off. Like an SSD, unlike RAM.

That's a stupid name isn't it... Just to randomly nab a few of the many definitions of volatile;
# That can be readily vaporized.
# Inconstant; fickle
# Tending to violence; explosive

None of those are qualities I'd want any part of my computer to have, especially memory. Can you imagine it just randomly decides to forget a few things and then explodes before the remaining shards of component evaporate into thin air :rolleyes:

What about a more sensible name like Persistent Memory?

Anyway back to the serious discussion... Still I think I raise a valid point :think:

[Kayin]

First, it has more bandwidth than a traditional drive, second, caching even an MLC drive to an SLC is a speed boost. Nothing is faster than SLC unless it's SLC in RAID.

It's pretty nice. SSD caching should speed up slower systems, as well as the fact that the mini PCI-E interface will mean that any SSD in that form factor will fit. I like it, it's just for the wrong processor for me.

[RogueOpportunist]

I'd have to see its retail price point before making any final judgement, if this is like 150-200$ then yeah, I could see it being useful... Much more than that and it starts getting into blurred territory where you could just as easily stripe 2 MLC's for even better performance... Or get a Revo.

[Kayin]

Somewhere around $500 USD. SLC ain't cheap.

[RogueOpportunist]

Yeah, see, if the additional cost to have this little on-board cache is more than it would cost to buy 2 or 3 low-end MLC SSD's then it is utterly pointless to have because despite their individually inferior performance a striped set of MLC's is gonna blow the doors off a single SLC.

These types of things have been around forever, I have yet to run into any scenario where caching with a single high speed device is more cost effective and performance friendly than spending that money on increasing the throughput of the drives themselves... Maybe this will change, who knows... This isn't anything new though, the idea of using ram/flash/whatever to cache hard drives has been around forever... Hell you could just buy 24 gig of ram, make a 20 gig ramdisk and use it as a cache.


According to Intel's site (http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/325502.pdf) the SSD being used has up to 200mb/s read and 105mb/s write... Even by MLC standards those are not impressive numbers, sounds to me like these are likely going to be cheap and Gigabyte/Intel struck a deal to unload some of Intel's old stock SLC chips before the new "tech" hits market and they become worthless.