Intel successfully managed to overclock an SSD by 10 percent at its Intel Developer Forum, but it's unclear whether or not the company will ever formally release the technology to market.
Intel representatives successfully dialed up the clock speed on the memory controller governing its SSDs from 400MHz to 625MHz at the end of an overclocking session at IDF this week. Intel has explicitly supported overclocking some of its high-end processors, a feat often accompanied byspectacular gouts of liquid nitrogen and the risk of melting down the processor itself.
OEMs and consumers alike already select SSDs for speed. Intel's SSD 530 series reads and writes data sequentially at 540 Mbits and 480 Mbits/s, respectively. Random accesses of data, however, are where an SSD truly shines, with 41 million reads and 80 million writes per second. Performance hard drives like Western Digital's Black line are rated at 1,100 Mbit/s for sequential data streaming, like video, but can't keep up with SSDs on the random reads and writes that typify normal computing.
With SSDs and hard drives, however, the risk is losing a user's data—all at once, catastrophically. Drive failures posed a real problem in the early days of SSDs, and damaged their reputation.
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