News

Intel Quietly Revealed Its Super-Fast SSD.

To Start Shipping in September

[08/21/2008 09:09 PM]
by Ilya Gavrichenkov

One of the topics during the last IDF was Intel’s plans in conquering the flash-drives market. Even though these SSD drives haven’t been officially announced yet, their complete specifications are currently available on the manufacturer’s web-site.

So, we can finally report the all the details about the promising solid-state drives from Intel. The company is preparing two series of SSD drives: mainstream X18-M and X25-M (1.8-inch form-factor and 2.5-inch form-factor respectively) and server X25-E Extreme. The former will use relatively slow but inexpensive multi level cell (MLC) NAND, while the latter - single level cell (SLC) memory. The “extreme” SSD drives will providing 170 MB/s sustained sequential write and 250 MB/s sustained sequential read due to 10-channel Intel-designed memory access controller. The data transfer rates of the mainstream SSD drives equal 70 MB/s and 250 MB/s respectively.

The “M” series drives consume 0.15W in active mode and 0.06W in idle mode. The “E” drives require 2.4W in read/write modes (0.06W in idle mode, as well). However, the “E” series of drives should replace not the regular server HDDs, but the highest-performing ones – working at 15,000RPM.

80GB SSD X18-M and X25-M should start shipping in September. In Q4 we will see first mainstream 160GB samples, which will go into mass production in Q1 2009. The “E” flash-drives will come out within three months. The first server drive will be of 32GB capacity. Its 64GB counterpart is due in Q4.

All SSDs will support SATA II interface with NCQ support. The company claims that their server SSDs will have 2 million hours MTBF (standard life span for server HDDs). Mainstream SSDs will guarantee to least 5 years at average 100GB/day writes.

According to the released specifications, Intel SSDs will boast higher performance than the competing solutions by other vendors. In fact, only Micron solutions will be able to adequately compete against the newcomers. As we have already reported before, they announced a very promising RealSSD lineup a while back with 250 MB/s read speed. However, the write speed should be better by Intel drives.