Intel Will Demo “SSD Overclocking” At IDF 2013

According to a report by X-Bit Labs it could soon be possible to overclock your SSD. Apparently Intel will reveal such a technology at their IDF 2013 event. Of course you do not “overclock” the SSD per-sé but instead you overclock its controller. An SSD controller, from most SSD vendors, is merely an ARM processor which controls data rates and data flow as well as instruction sets like TRIM. At IDF 2013 Intel will reveal the Xtreme Tuning Utility (XTU) that will allow users to overclock Intel branded SSDs.

Options to overclock SSDs were discovered in Intel’s XTU unified software package. What the XTU would allow Intel SSD users to do include:

• Change the frequency of the SSD controller
• Alter the NAND Flash bus-speed

Of course in most cases an SSD is limited not by itself but by the SATA III 6Gbps interface. Overclocking the current generation of SSDs hardly makes sense but when the new SATA Express standard is rolled out we could see demand for this kind of SSD overclocking. SATA Express will support 8Gbps and 16Gbps transfer rates. It goes without saying that overclocking current-generation SSDs will cause stability issues on some SSDs.

Intel’s IDF 2013 event takes place in San Francisco, California, from September 10th to September 12th at the Moscone Convention Center. More details about SSD overclocking will be revealed then

Image courtesy of Intel