Intel SSD Drives

Intel's new line of 80GB and 160GB flash drives provide massive performance boosts in transfer rates, the chip giant says.


Things are set to heat up in the solid state drive market, with Intel adding SSDs to its menu of products. Unlike its previous flash memory solutions which have been based on mini-card modules, the new drives are built around the standard 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch form factors found in netbooks, notebooks and compact desktops. 80GB drives will roll off the production line at the end of next month, with 160GB versions hitting in first quarter of 2009.

“CPU performance has scaled tremendously over the years, but while hard drives have done a great job in capacity they haven’t done much in performance” said Kishore Rao, Product Manager for Intel’s new line of High Performance SATA Solid State Drives. “Performance has grown by only a factor of 1.3 since January 2006, which leads to a tremendous IO bottleneck.”

Intel claims the X18-M (1.8 inch) and X25-M (2.5 inch) drives have read speeds up to 250MB/s, write speeds to 70MB/s and a read latency of 85 microseconds. More of a concern for many would-be users is the life of the drive, however Rao says that based on 100GB of transfers per day the drives would deliver “five years useful life in a PC, and a high-end user would use maybe only 20GB per day”.

The drives themselves use a proprietary controller and firmware but are designed around the standard ONFI 1.0 (Open NAND Flash Interface) flash interface developed by a consortium led by the likes of Intel, Sony and Micron Technology. Samsung, which is the world's largest manufacturer of NAND flash, is notably absent from the ONFI consortium.

Intel’s move into the SSD space move puts the chipmaker in the box seat for supplying PC manufacturers vendors with solid state drives. While pricing won’t be revealed until the launch of the 80GB unit, Rao predicted that “you’ll see very competitive pricing on these drives”.

David Flynn is attending IDF Fall 2008 in San Francisco as a guest of Intel.