Intel to demonstrate the overclocking of SSDs at IDF

Intel announced that it will dedicate a session to overclocking at the IDF 2013 in San Francisco. Set to take place on Tuesday, September 10 from 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM, the session will provide details on overclocking mobile and desktop Haswell processors, as well as live overclocking demonstrations, including one of the first public demonstrations in which an Intel Core i7 4xxx Extreme Edition CPU will be overclocked.

The chip giant will also show off its new AppTune beta tool and deliver world's first public demonstration of overclocking Intel SSDs! The overclocking of SSDs sounds like great news for benchmark enthusiasts, but this doesn't really seem to be something you'd want to try on your work or game PC without at least a good backup.

Overclocking of solid-state drives may sound odd, yet it is something that can absolutely be done. For example, clock-rate of SSD controllers can be increased, data rates of NAND flash memory can also be boosted. The main thing that needs to be ensured is that data integrity is maintained in overclocked condition of a storage device.

One thing that should be noted is that modern SSDs are so fast that the bottleneck is not their read, write speeds or IOPS performance, but the Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface itself. Boosting the interface will most likely result in considerably lower reliability. Therefore, overclocking of today’s SSDs hardly makes sense. However, next year Intel plans to roll out chipsets with SATA Express interface support, which provide transfer rates of 8Gb/s or 16Gb/s. For next-generation solid-state drives, especially when overclocked, the new interface speeds are just what the doctor ordered.

Via: X-bit Labs