Intel announces its 710 Series SSD drives

STORAGE VENDOR Intel has announced its 710 Series SATA solid state disk (SSD) drives designed for the data centre.

The Intel Developer Forum was the setting for the debut of the new drives, which replace the X25-E Extreme SSD series. The 710 SSD drives will be made with multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory using Intel's 25nm process.

Rob Crooke, VP and GM of non-volatile memory at Intel said, "The SSD 710 Series gives enterprise data center and embedded users extreme endurance and performance, enabled by Intel's High Endurance Technology based on Intel 25nm MLC NAND technology."

The drives will be available in 100GB, 200GB or 300GB capacities and will have a 3Gbits/s SATA II interface. Intel claims the 710 Series will offer the endurance of a single level cell (SLC) SSD in an MLC package and satisfy performance, reliability and total cost of ownership needs.

Just to show off the size of the latest SSD drive and how the technology has evolved over the years Winslow showed a Intel 12MB PATA SSD drive from the 80s, which means the 300GB 710 has 25,000 times the capacity. The 710 Series offers up to 30 times the endurance of Intel's 320 Series.

Intel said the 710 SSD achieves 4K random write performance of up to 2,700 input-output operations per second (IOPS) and 4K random read performance of up to 38,500 IOPS. It can cope with 1.1 petabyte of write endurance.

Data protection will include power loss data protection, pre-configured 128bit advanced encryption standard (AES) data encryption and surplus NAND flash memory for system protection if a die fails. µ