THE SSD drive hype has toned down a bit now, as a result of some inconsistent performance across various vendors, and further doubts on long term reliability, even with wear-levelling algorithms.

Benchmarks and real-life usage situations show massive improvements over hard disks in some cases, just to give terrible disappointments in others. Ever seen the otherwise pointless Sysmark? Well, SSD vs HDD there doesn't look too 'flashy'.

Intel has just started peddling its 32GB, 80GB and above flash SSD drives, with the recent IDF being the first event showing the production units. They claim their SATA units show much higher real performance compared to certain " S*" competing offerings. We're just not sure whether that "S*" means SSD, Samsung, Sandisk, Supertalent or someone else...

In summary, Intel claims its deep inner understanding of NAND Flash that it designs and makes, after all, lets it fine tune the write amplification, cycling and wear levelling to maximise the usually bottlenecking write performance without compromising the reliability. Still, the claimed difference is just too huge to believe.

Now, we can't believe that Samsung, Sandisk and others can't have offerings with similar performance. After all, they also design and make NAND chips for years, and know the technology darn well - just look at Sandisk' patent portfolio on this.

However, if even half of what Intel SSD team claims really stands up against the recent competitors' drives, there's a trouble - Intel is darn aggressive when they smell a chance at grabbing a dominant position in a new market and, keep in mind, Intel's drives look cool, too. On our side, we don't believe anything till we test it ourselves anyway - do expect our take on this soon. µ