 Linus Tech Tips coverage of PAX 2013 is brought to you by Western Digital, Intel, and SteelSeries. We're here at the BYOC sort of, uh, joined Intel booth at PAX Prime with Justin Whitney, who's one of their team members when it comes to SSD marketing. And you guys are talking about something that actually, for my regular viewers, I said was crazy. Like, 24 hours ago. Justify this to me, explain what this is, come on man. Um, to be really honest, I thought it was a little crazy too. Um, so what we're talking about is, uh, we've got a prototype drive here. First time shown ever. We wanted to come to PAX, talk to the press, and more importantly, get end user reaction to this technology. We had a couple of customers that approached us and said, you know, SATA bus is starting to get saturated. The technology is stagnating a little bit. We're looking ahead to PCI Express. Before you even get there, can you do any overclocking of your drives? How can you tune the performance? And, you know, my initial reaction was, you guys are insane. Why, why would you adjust the performance settings and maybe risk people's data? They're like, why does it have to be risky? So, I mean, we took that customer feedback, started making this kind of Skunkworks project. Um, in our labs, like, wow, it can be stable. Let's go show it off and see what end user's reactions are. So show me the tool, uh, right here. This is a beta, beta feature within the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility called SSD. What can you do to the drive to tweak performance? There's, there's really two settings in here. We're looking at the, the, the controller itself or the, the ASIC. That's essentially the CPU of the, of the drive. And we're also looking at the NAND, um, bus itself and the frequency on that bus. So we've got those two knobs. In, in the first instance, we can go from 400 megahertz to about 600, 625. I'm sorry, did you just say that, like, that's a 50% plus overclock. Yeah, that's a, exactly. On the, on the controller for that drive. Okay. And then so for the, the NAND bus frequency, what are, what are we looking at here? 80, the, the stock on it is 83 megahertz and that goes up to 100. Okay. So you guys are taking a lot of user feedback. You're segmenting people out into kind of like pro gamers versus modders versus, you know, even data center and IT guys who are here at the show. What surprised you most about the feedback you're getting? Well, I had to pick myself up off of the floor here in our booth. When I found out that we had three data center guys that had just gone through this, this little clinic we were doing. And I asked them, would you overclock the drive after what you saw? Would you do it? And they're like, oh yeah, we would do it right now. And I was like, why would you possibly put your data at risk or other people's data at risk? And they're like, there is no risk for us. We're going to validate the technology. We're going to stress test it. We're going to look at the life of the drive and then we're going to put it in a cache array. All the data is safe behind that. Here's our cache. Overclock that, get our, our performance tuned, jack up the, the IOPS, you know, the random IOPS on those drives and you know, just roll with it. Okay. So then the less surprising one, I guess, is the, the enthusiast gamers and I mean, what have they been saying so far? So far they're like, if there's a knob, we want to turn it. Please don't limit it. Let us push it till it breaks. And I was like, whoa, wait, that's your, that's your storage drive. Why would you want OS on there and brick it? And they're like, well, I can always, you know, I would, I would test it out. And if it, you know, if the drive froze, I would unlock it. And if you give me a utility, oh, so you want a utility to unlock. Yeah. So, okay. If we give you an unlock utility, then you're okay with it. Yeah. I'll just reinstall the OS or another end user jumped to the same conclusion as a data center. They would put it into a cash drive configuration and leave their, their bulk storage alone. So what kind of a performance improvement are we potentially looking at here? You've got a SSSD running on a regular five 20 and then on this prototype, you know, prototype flash prototype controller prototype firmware and prototype utility. What are we looking at here? Did you mention this was a prototype drive? I think I missed that part. You better clarify it for the audience. Yeah, this is not a production part. No announcement. This is a prototype. What we're really seeing we the top score was from our five 20 series drive the bottom was just the baseline settings on this prototype. And we're seeing over a 10% performance gain. But more importantly, if you take a look at the sequential rights, there was a big jump, and that's this this prototypes drives ability to handle incompressible data is really solid. Depending on which controller you're based on, you may not handle incompressible data, you know, high bit rate, high definition audio video those kinds of things. This drive handles all data equally equally well. So we saw that bump immediately. Then we started overclocking it random IOPS, we saw scores go up, at least in this little clinic here 22%. So, some of the sequential rights we saw go up 18% overall scores, you know, 1518 depends so we're, you know, we didn't, we didn't push it too far, we wanted to be stable here and get that, you know, that feedback rather than well I did it in a bricked I'm out of here but, you know, so far so good. So I want some comments under this video because I think Justin's covered the pros and cons pretty well at this point. Two things number one is guys viewers out there, would you sacrifice the longevity of your SSD to have more performance let's say you could get a 20% bump let's just throw that random number out there. Would you be willing to sacrifice that and number two is I guess just a more, a more general. How would you utilize this, would you be comfortable running your entire system off and overclocked SSD, would you run your OS often SSD and have all of your save games and everything on a secondary hard drive, or would you go with something like a cash solution like the data center guys were saying so thank you very much Justin this has been awesome. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming and checking it out at PAX first. Cool man. Guys don't forget we're powered here at the show by Western Digital Intel, thanks for the Intel collectively, and SteelSeries we couldn't have done it without you.