Gadgetory

Linus tech tips coverage of pax 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital Intel and steel series we're here at the BYOC sort of a joined intel booth at PAX 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 to be really honest i thought it was a little crazy too so what we're talking about is that we've got a prototype drive here first time show never we wanted to we want to come to pax talk to the press and more importantly get end-user reaction to this technology we had a couple of customers that approached us and said you know sad a bus is starting to get saturated the technology use it stagnating a little bit we're looking ahead to PCI Express before even get there can you do any overclocking year drives how can you tune the performance and my initial reaction was 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 took that customer feedback started making this kind of skunk works project in our labs like wow it can be stable let's go show it up and see what end users reactions are so show me the tool 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 controller itself or the ASIC it's essentially the CPU of the of the drive and we're also looking at the nan bus itself in the frequency on that bus so we've got those two knobs in in the first instance we can go from 400 megahertz to about 6 600 625 I'm sorry did you just say that like that's a 50-percent plus overclock yeah that's a exactly on the on the controller or that drive ok and then so for the the nan bus frequency what I what are we looking at here eighty the stock on it is 83 megahertz and that goes up to a hundred okay so you guys are taking a lot of user feedback your segmenting people out into kind of like pro gamers versus modders versus you know even data center an IT guys who are here at the show what surprised you most about the feedback you're getting hey 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 as 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'm 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 gonna 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 cache array all the data is safe behind that here's our cash overclock that get our performance tune jack up the the I ops you know the random I ups 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 but 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 whoa wait that's your that's your storage Drive why would do you want OS on there and brick it they're like well I can always hope you know I would I would test it out and if it you know if the dr froze i would unlock it in if you give me a utility oh so you want to utility done look 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 end user jump 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 a sssd running on a regular 520 and then on this prototype you know prototype flash prototype controller prototype firmware and prototype utility what are we looking at here did you mention this was a prototype drive 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 what we're really seeing we that 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 ten percent performance gain but more importantly if you take a look at the sequential writes there's a big jump and that's this this prototypes drives ability to handle incompressible data is really solid depending on which controller you're based on you may not handle incompressible data you know high bitrate 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 I ups we saw scores go up at least in this little clinic here twenty-two percent so some of the sequential writes we saw go up eighteen percent 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 wow I did it in a brick time out of here but you know so far so good so I want some comments under this video because I think Justin's covered the pros and cons pretty well at this point 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 twenty percent 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 more a more general um how would you utilize this would you be comfortable running your entire system off an overclocked SSD would you run your OS often SSD and have all of your saved games and everything on a secondary hard drive or would you go with something like a cache solution like the data center guys were saying so thank you very much dustin has been awesome appreciate it thanks for coming and checking it out at PAX first cool man guys don't forget we're powered here at the show by western digital Intel thanks it fit and tell collectively and steelseries we couldn't have done it without you