Intel previews SSD overclocking

Overclocking of processors and graphics cards has been a staple of the PC enthusiast community for years, but it looks like a new component will soon be available for the tweaking set.

Intel, which offers CPUs with unlocked multipliers (the "K" series) to ease the overclocking process, is now apparently working on letting users overclock their solid-state drives. The company just previewed the overclocking potential of its SSDs at the PAX Prime festival, with more info supposedly coming at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum next week.

Read more at: Intel previews SSD overclocking | ZDNet

 

[Cr00zng]

The article also warns about OC-ing the SSD, quote:

It may also touch on the potential risks of overclocking. Adjusting the settings of your processor or graphics card can lead to system stability and other issues; tweaking SSD settings could potentially threaten your data on the drive, so Intel will need to address this concern as well as the potential for shortening the life of your SSD.

It's one thing when the system locks up with OC-d CPU, or the video card goes bunkers, but entirely different when the SSD is corrupted due to OC-ing the SSD. In a nutshell, the difference is reboot vs. re-image...

I'd rather wait for the next speed bump for the SATA, quote:

The latest revision of the long-running SATA specification, SATA 3.2 brings a number of improvements for storage devices - but by far the most interesting is SATA Express. A variant of SATA first announced back in January this year, SATA Express uses up to two PCI Express 3.0 lanes to offer a peak transfer rate of 16Gb/s, or 2GB/s, compared to SATA 3's 6Gb/s.

To visualise the performance difference, it's easiest to fall back on the old Blu-ray comparison: a SATA 3 storage device capable of saturating the 6Gb/s bus speed would transfer a 50GB Blu-ray image in around 67 seconds; a storage device running over SATA Express, meanwhile, could do the same in just 25 seconds.

Source

 

[Shallow]

Not something I would do.

 

[Ruudfood]

Nice idea but not sure that's a risk I want to take. Having said that, if the risk is only data corruption rather than hardware damage, then you could always image your SSD (which is likely to contain just your OS and critical programs) on a schedule to restore if necessary.