lineus Tech tips coverage of pxs 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel
and steel series we're here at the
byoc sort of joined Intel booth at PA
Prime with Justin Whitney who's one of their team members when it comes to SSD
marketing and you guys are talking about something that actually for my regular
viewers I said was crazy like 24 hours
ago justify this to me explain what this is come on man um to to be really honest
I thought it was a little crazy too um so what we're talking about is a we've
got a prototype drive here first time shown ever we wanted to we wanted to
come to PS talk to the press and more importantly get enduser reaction to this
technology we had a couple of customers that approached us and said you know
SATA bus is starting to get saturated the technology is it stagnating a little
bit we're looking ahead to PCI Express before you even get there
can you do any overclocking of your drives how can you tune the performance
and you my initial reaction was you guys
are insane why why would you adjust the
performance settings and maybe risk people's data they're like why does it
have to be risky so I mean we we took that customer
feedback started making this kind of Skunk Works project um in our Labs like
wow it it can be stable let's go show it
off and see what end users re reactions are so show me the Tool uh right here
this is a beta beta feature within the Intel extreme tuning utility called SSD
what can you do to the drive to tweak performance there's there's really two
settings in here we're looking at the the the controller itself or the the the
Asic it's essentially the CPU of the of the drive and we're also looking at the
Nan um bus itself and the frequency on
that bus so we've got those two knobs in
in the first instance we can from 400 MZ
to about 6 600 625 I'm sorry did you
just said that like that's a 50% plus overclock yeah that's a exactly on the
on the controller for that drive okay and then so for the the nanb
frequency what what are we looking at here 80 the the stock on it is 83 MHz
and that goes up to 100 okay so you guys
are taking a lot of user feedback you're segmenting people out into kind of like
Pro Gamers versus modders versus you
know even Data Center and it guys who are here at the show what surprised you
most about the feedback you're getting I
well I had to pick myself up off of the
floor here in our booth when I found out
that we had three data center guys that had just gone through this this little
clinic we were doing and I asked them would you
overclock the drive after what you saw would you do it they're like oh yeah we
would do it right now and I was like why would you possibly put your data at risk
or other people's data at risk and they're like there is no risk for us
we're going to validate the technology we're going to stress test it we're
going to look at the the life of the drive and then we're going to put it in
a cach array all the data safe behind
that here's our cach we'll overclock
that get our our Performance Tuned jack up the the iops you know the random iops
on those drives and you know just roll with it okay so then the less surprising
one I guess is the the Enthusiast Gamers and I mean what have they been saying so
far so far they're like if there's a knob we want to turn it please don't
limit it let us push it till it breaks and I was whoa wait that's your that's
your storage Drive why would do you want OS on there and and brick it they're
like well I can always you know I would I would test it out and if it you know
if the drive froze I would unlock it and
if you give me a utility oh so you want a utility to
unlock yeah yeah so okay if we give you an unlock utility then you're okay with
it yeah I'll just reinstall the OS or
another and user jumped to the same conclusion as a data center they would
put it into a Cash Drive configuration and leave their their bulk storage alone
so what kind of a performance Improvement are we potentially looking at here you've got assd running um on a
regular 520 and then on this prototype
uh you know prototype flash prototype controller prototype firmware prototype
utility what are we looking at here um did you mention this was a prototype
Drive I I think I missed that part you better clarify it for the audience yeah
this is not a production part no announcement this is a
prototype uh what we're really seeing we
the the top score was a from our 520 series Drive the bottom was just the
Baseline settings on this prototype and
we're seeing over a a 10% performance gain but more importantly if you take a
look at the quential rights um there was a big jump and
that's this this prototypes drives ability to handle incompressible data is
really solid um depending on which controller you're based on you may not
handle incompressible data you know High bit rate um high definition audio video
those kinds of things this drive handles all data equally equally well so we saw
that bump immediately then we started overclocking it random myops we saw
scores go up um at least in this little clinic here
22% so some of the sequential rights we
saw go up 18% overall scores you know 15
18 depends so we're you know we didn't we didn't push it too far we wanted it
to be stable here and get that you know that feedback rather than well I did it
and it bricked I'm out of here but yeah so far so good so I want some comments
under this video because I think Justin's covered the the pros and cons
pretty well at this point um two things
number one is guys viewers out there would you sacrifice the longevity of
your SSD to have more performance let's say you could get a 20% bump let's just
throw that random number out there would you be willing to sacrifice that and
number two is I guess just a a more a
more General um how would you utilize
this would you be comfortable running your entire system off an overclock SSD
would you run your OS off an SSD and have all of your save games and
everything on a secondary hard drive or would you go with something like a cash
solution like the data center guys were saying so thank you very much Justin this has been awesome appreciate it
thanks for uh coming and checking it out at PA first cool man guys don't forget
we're powered here at the show by Western Digital Intel thanks for to
Intel collectively and steel series we couldn't have done it without you