We all know what an SSD is, almost all of us are clear about the concept of Solid State Drive as such and logically we see its advantages. But what if we could buy a specific model that could adjust the speed according to our needs? We are talking about overclocking an SSD, a concept that with this term and this product seems illogical at first glance, but which would fit into the idea of adjustable speed. Well, Intel is talking about it and… The experience on the overclock an ssd it was cancelled.
In case you don’t know, Intel has a specific overclocking department where Dan Ragland has a mission: to manage it and push the products to the maximum. What for many is a hobby where they spend time and resources to break a record, where there are industry professionals who compete for excellence and down to the last MHz, for Intel engineers, c is child’s play. Ragland mentioned in an interview something quite curious and to which we referred: overclocking an SSD. Why did the blue giant fail to do so?
Intel has experimented with an adjustable speed boost for SSDs
The concept of overclockable SSDs is a complicated thing and Intel knew it, but the company’s approach behind Ragland reveals how they try to push every product or idea to the limit, which is very interesting because of the way of thinking of the company. The statements of Intel Overclocking Director When asked about overclocked products that didn’t see the light of day, they are, as they say, “pure gold”:
Yes, we like to experiment. Say any (product) and we certainly tried to overclock it! All kinds of products from different categories. We talked about laptops and desktops, and there are also other things we tried to overclock. I don’t mean we’ve reviewed everything Intel has done, but when a new product category comes out, we look at it and ask if there’s a margin. We wonder if there is a market for overclocking. We ask consumers if they want this or if it will have value. I’ll give you an example: I did some pioneering work on SSD overclocking.
In fact, there’s a lot of room for improvement, at least when it comes to overclocking SSDs, because just like a CPU, they have their own power limits and, depending on whether you can cool it or what environment you’re in, there’s a margin. But when we evaluated it and wondered if the data was at risk, we asked the market and we did some polls and finally we made the decision to don’t go that way. It’s something we always keep an open mind about, but at the time it was the decision.
Overclocking an SSD: various problems
Logically, an SSD stores information and works with it, offers it and receives it at an increasingly higher speed in terms of transfer rate per second (MB / therefore GB / s). In any case, it is information that can be non-substantial or, on the contrary, vital, so it has the maximum relevance in many cases. Increasing the internal frequency of an SSD as if it were a CPU or a GPU has very important repercussions, since the instability of certain frequencies can lead to incorrect storage of data and therefore corrupt information and totally or partially damage the files.
This is a problem derived from the security and integrity of this data, but at the technical level the increase in frequency and with it the speed implies that they should be added more cell voltage checks and to the controller in addition to improved power systems for such SSDs, which increase the complexity and cost too much to consider, they basically do not justify the increase in performance.
For this reason, Intel has decided to cancel this SSD overclocking experiment, even if curiously it remains wait-and-see on this subject. Is it possible they will get it in the future? Perhaps not given the growing complexity of the cellular system with each generation. It would have to be something totally groundbreaking that we don’t know if the average user will appreciate enough to invest in it.
