The Intel SSD 320 Review: 25nm G3 is Finally Here

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• bji - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  But don't they? I am pretty sure that the listed price for a 160 GB drive is about the same as I paid for my 80 GB G2 a year ago. Maybe these prices are higher than current prices on the older generation drives but you really should compare products at the same point of their life cycle to be fair. The G3 is half the cost that the G2 was at launch (actually less than half if I am remembering correctly) and in a year when they are at a later point in the product life cycle they wil be half as expensive or less per GB than the G2 is at the same point of its life cycle.

• qwertymac93 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  I think we all knew it wouldn't be as fast as The new sandforces, but i didn't expect it to be so expensive. i guess intel figured people will buy it just because it's intel. Not me though, I'm waiting for next gen(<25nm) ssd's before i make the plunge, i want sub $1 per gig.

• A5 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  Oh well - $170 for 120GB is still pretty good.

• AnnonymousCoward - Sunday, April 3, 2011 - link

  G2 120GB is $230.

• aork - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  "That works out to be 320GB of NAND for a drive whose rated capacity is 300GB. In Windows you'll see ~279GB of free space, which leaves 12.8% of the total NAND capacity as spare area."
  
  Actually you only see 279 GB of free space in Windows because Windows displays in GiB (2^30 bytes), not true GB (10^9 bytes). In truth, you are only getting the expected 6.25% of the total NAND capacity as spare area.

• Stahn Aileron - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  Flash storage is, as far as I know, always treated as binary multiples, not decimal. SSD drive manufacturers take advantage of the discrepancy between the OS's definition and the HD manufacturers' definition of storage units (GiB - 2^(x*10) - vs GB - 10^(x*3)) to help cover the spare area.
  
  It also helps keep everything consistent within the storage industry. Can you imagine the fallout from having a 300GB SSD actually being 300GiB vs an "identically sized" 300GB HDD reporting only 279GiB? If the consumers don't get pissy about that, I'm positive the HDD manufacturers would.

• Mr Perfect - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  Yeah, disappointing really. The switch to SSDs would have been a golden opportunity for drives to format to what the label says. Oh well.

• Taft12 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  Marketing would never allow that. We're not going back to binary measures of storage ever again :(

• Zan Lynx - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  And why would we? RAM is the only thing that was ever calculated in powers of 2. Ever.
  
  CPU MHz? 10-base.
  Network speed? 10-base.
  Hard drive capacity? Always 10-base. Since forever!
  
  Making Flash size in base-2 would introduce a new exception, not restore any wondrous old measurement system.
  
  If the label says 300 GB and the box contains 300,000,000,000 bytes, then it does contain exactly what was advertised. Giga as a prefix has always meant 1 billion. Gigahertz? 1 billion cycles per second. Gigameter? 1 billion meters. 1 gigaflops? 1 billion floating point operations per second.

• jwilliams4200 - Monday, March 28, 2011 - link

  Well said, Zan. I thought that almost everyone knew this, but it is disappointing to see Anand still using the wrong units in his reviews and tables. Windows reports sizes in GiB, but incorrectly labels it GB. Unfortunately, Anand makes the same mistake. Sad.