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Intel Ships 80 GB SSDsBy Pedro HernandezSeptember 8, 2008
The desktop and notebook solid-state drive market got a little more crowded today with the announcement that Intel has begun shipping SATA compatible X18-M and X25-M drives.
Naturally, any SSD discussion inevitably brings up the technology's low-power consumption rates. To that end, Intel reports that the units draw 0.15W during drive activity and 0.06W while idle. According to the chipmaker, both drives can achieve up to 250MB per second read speeds and 70MB per second write speeds. As the model numbers imply, the X18-M is a 1.8" drive for notebooks and the X25-M has a 2.5" form factor meant for desktops. In a statement, Intel's vice president and general manager of the NAND Products Group, Randy Wilhelm, listed the technological advances that set his company's drives apart. During their development, he states, "we 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." Among the drive maintenance features is "endurance management" logic that strives to ensure that the drives achieve a minimum five-year useful life. When a system exceeds 20 GB in writes per day by a sizable amount, the feature automatically tunes write performance to minimize wear. Otherwise, durability is rated at 1.2 million hours mean time before failure. As for the future, the company has hinted at 160 GB versions trickling out during the next quarter. Intel is also targeting the server space with the single-level cell-based X25-E Extreme, which is expected to ship before year's end.
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Marketed under the "Mainstream" banner, Intel doesn't bother to hide its ambition to replace traditional hard drives with the 80GB drives based on multi-level cell architecture. Unsurprisingly, however, they carry a decidedly non-mainstream price of $595 (in typical 1,000-unit bulk pricing).
