2012/04/10

Intel introduces NAND SSDs

Intel has introduced it's 313 series solid state drives (SSDs) based on their single cell NAND design (which are longer lasting and more reliable than existing multi-cell SSDs. The drives are only available in 20GB and 24GB variants and are designed to complement existing hard drives for faster boot up or hibernation. The 20GB drive can sustain 220Mb/s while reading and 100MB/s for writes, while the 24GB drive supports 160MB/s and 115MB/s with pricing of $109 and $139 respectively. Though SSDs are cropping up everywhere they do have long term issues (most consumer SSDs will only support around 5,000 write cycles per cell, but the disks are optimised to minimise writes and cells are switched between blocks as to minimise actual writes per cell) whereas hard drives last for much longer, so hybrid drives may be the optimal solution. here Intel have just removed the SSD cache into a separate disk.