Intel Ships Enterprise-Class Solid-State Drives
Intel has begun to ship its new enterprise-class solid-state drives (SSDs). The Intel X-25E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive features 50nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory and is capable of 250MB/s read and 170MB/s write speeds. The 32GB capacity drive is in production and is priced at $695. A 64GB version is expected to go into production in the first quarter of 2009.
Intel Corporation has begun shipping its highest-performing solid-state drive (SSD), the Intel® X-25E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive, aimed at server, workstation and storage systems. Unlike mechanical drives, the SSDs contain no moving parts and instead feature 50nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology. Systems equipped with these drives will not suffer from the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional drives. By reducing the total infrastructure, cooling and energy costs, SSDs can lower total cost of ownership for enterprise applications by more than five times.
“Hard disk drive performance has not kept pace with Moore’s Law,” said Kirk Skaugen, general manager, Intel Server Platforms group. “Intel’s high-performance SSDs unleash the full performance of the latest Intel Xeon processor-based systems while increasing reliability and lowering the total cost of ownership for a broad range of server and storage workloads.”
