Intel shipping enterprise SSDs

YESTERDAY INTEL began shipping its X-25E Extreme SATA SSD, said to be its highest-performing solid-state drives available for servers, workstations, and storage systems.

Featuring 50-nanometer single-level cell NAND flash memory technology, the X25E Extreme apparently bangs out 35,000 read input/output operations (IOPS) a second and 3,300 write IOPS with a read latency of 75 microseconds.

Intel reckons its small, 2.5 inch SSD packs 100 times more performance than hard disk drives (in IOPS) and since it has no moving parts, it can purportedly lower energy costs by up to five times. Chipzilla also says the little drives are more reliable than the hard kind, but the catch is, they’re also much, much more expensive.

The X25E Extreme was apparently designed with intense computing workloads in mind and consumes 2.4 watts, putting out 14,000 IOPS per watt. More specs for the 32 GB Intel X-25E SATA SSD include 35,000 IOPS (4KB Random Read), 3,300 IOPS (4KB Random Write) and 75 microsecond read latency. The device also supposedly achieves up to 250 MB per second of sequential read speeds and up to 170 MB per second sequential write speeds.

The 32-GB version, shipping now, currently costs $695 in quantities up to 1,000 and Intel says it will start shipping samples of a 64-GB SSD to computer makers this quarter.

Intel reckons the 32-GB drive can write up to 4 PB of data over three years before it needs to be replaced, while the 64-GB version will be able to write up to double the data during the same time frame.

Chipzilla aren’t the only ones in the SSD market, however, and Samsung Electronics just recently announced its 32-GB and 64-GB drives would be bunged into HP’s ProLiant BL495c virtualisation blade server, so Intel needs to watch its back.

Still, until the price of SSDs comes down quite a lot, it doesn’t look like it’s worth getting in too much of a state about anything. µ