You Rook Mahvelous

Just when you've figured it out, the world has a habit of slapping you upside the head.  By now, you've likely heard that Intel has announced its next SSD, the 510.  It's not, explicitly, the X-25/G3.  From the various sources I read, a G3 will be coming along in due time, but is intended to be the "consumer" version, while the newly announced 510 is the "pro" part.

Here's what's puzzling:  as you can see from this AnandTech article, the 510 is biased toward *sequential* processing!  Boy howdy, I never saw that coming.  That, and the fact that the controller isn't home grown, but bought in from Marvell.  The G3 is said to be driven by Intel's controller, but not yet confirmed.

The world has been turned upside down.  Either that, or Intel has completely misread both the technical and buyer worlds.  A sequentially biased SSD makes sense for consumers:  gamers, video processing, and such.  I'm truly puzzled.  The parts aren't big enough in capacity to store anything like the massive files that a file based coder would use.  For the prosumer world that the X25 parts targeted, the 510 just won't be useful, it's barely on par with the X25-G2. 

We'll see.  The 510 still has an advantage over the SandForce drives for compressed/encrypted data, but that's usually things like my beloved relational databases and random processing, not the 510's strength.  Weird.