Intel Releases Capacious SSDs

By Greg McNevin

September 10, 2008: Intel has announced that its line of solid state drives (SSDs) for notebooks and desktops is now shipping, with an 80GB SATA model available initially, and 160GB models expected to be shipping later in the year.

Intel’s 1.8” X18-M and 2.5” X25-M Mainstream SATA SSDs are based on multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash technology for laptop and desktop computers.

Along with capacities finally large enough to give traditional magnetic storage drives a run for their money, Intel says the new SSDs offer faster overall system response, boot and resume times. As with all SSDs, they also run cooler and quieter with no moving parts, and offer increased reliability.

Performance is a paramount reason for making the switch to an SSD, and according to Intel lab tests show that the X18-M and X25M increase storage system performance nine times over traditional hard drives.

“Validated by our rigorous testing and OEM customer feedback, we believe that we have developed an SSD that delivers on the promises of SSD computing,” says Randy Wilhelm, Intel vice president and general manager of the NAND Products Group. “[W]e have added advances such as our parallel 10-channel architecture, proprietary controller, firmware and memory management algorithms that address write amplification and wear leveling issues to redefine SSD performance and reliability for computing platforms.”

Intel says that the 80GB drive achieves up to 250MB per second read speeds, up to 70MB per second write speeds and 85-microsecond read latency for fast performance.

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