July 22, 2009

CHIPMAKER INTEL has released new solid-state drives that are cheaper and have faster write speeds than their predecessors.

According to the company the X25-M SSDs for laptop and desktop PCs deliver close to double the write performance of Intel's earlier models.

Troy Winslow, director of marketing for Intel's NAND products, said the firm's 34nm process helped to keep prices down and better software was being used to speed up the SSDs.

As we reported two weeks ago, the 34nm process shrank the flash memory die, therefore reducing the cost by 60 per cent. The new 80GB drive has double the write speed of its predecessor, with 6,600 I/O operations per second. The 160GB version gets an even greater performance boost, up to 8,600 I/Os per second, Intel said.

Read speeds are similar to the 35,000 I/Os per second of Intel's prior technology and so many users might not notice much difference between the two. However the real difference is that the cost of the newer SSDs is much lower, so they might start to gain favour against the normal hard-drive market.

Intel has a problem in that its competitors such as Toshiba and Samsung offer SSDs with capacities up to 512GB, so the 80GB and 160GB capacities of Intel's new drives might not cut the mustard for some applications. Intel plans to double the capacity of its SSD drives by next year, it said.