October 5, 2010

Intel's 25nm solid state drives boast huge capacity, improved reliability, four times longer life?

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Solid state storage is maturing rapidly, as you can see on this allegedly leaked slide, butAnandTech reports that the improvements aren't all about price per gigabyte -- the 25nm successor to Intel's X25-M G2 is shaping up to be one killer drive. In addition to increasing capacity to 600GB for a 2.5-incher and 300GB for a 1.8-inch size, the publication reports that the Postville Refresh will bring up to 40,000 IOPS in random 4K writes, and transfer larger sequential files with up-to-250MB/s reads and 170MB/s writes. To put that in context, they should be competitive with today's very best SandForce SF-1200 drives, and hopefully trounce them on price. More impressive (if true), however, is that these new Intel X25-M G3 units are built to last: they're reportedly able to transfer at least 30TB before they give up the ghost, and have a "power safe write cache" feature that may keep errant power outages from prematurely conking them out. We don't exactly expect OCZ, Corsair, Mushkin and Crucial to sit around while Intel revolutionizes the market, though -- even if Intel's 25nm plant only benefits Intel, smaller die sizes will help solid state storage companies across the board.

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