Intel Ships Enterprise-Class Solid-State Drives
Intel Ships Enterprise-Class Solid-State Drives
New Drives Break Performance Barriers, Lower Storage Infrastructure, Cooling, Energy Costs
New Drives Break Performance Barriers, Lower Storage Infrastructure, Cooling, Energy Costs
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct. 15, 2008 - Intel Corporation has begun shipping its highest- performing solid-state drive (SSD), the Intel® X-25E Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive, aimed at server, workstation and storage systems. Unlike mechanical drives, the SSDs contain no moving parts and instead feature 50nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology. Systems equipped with these drives will not suffer from the performance bottlenecks associated with conventional drives. By reducing the total infrastructure, cooling and energy costs, SSDs can lower total cost of ownership for enterprise applications by more than five times.
"Hard disk drive performance has not kept pace with Moore's Law," said Kirk Skaugen, general manager, Intel Server Platforms group. "Intel's high-performance SSDs unleash the full performance of the latest Intel Xeon processor-based systems while increasing reliability and lowering the total cost of ownership for a broad range of server and storage workloads."

Intel achieves this breakthrough performance through innovations such as 10-channel NAND architecture with Native Command Queuing, proprietary controller and firmware efficient in advanced wear-leveling and low write amplification. The 32GB X25-E is capable of writing up to 4 petabytes (PB) of data over three-year period (3.7 TB/day), and double that for the 64GB version - delivering outstanding data reliability.
The 32GB capacity drive is in production and priced at $695 for quantities up to 1,000. The 64GB version is expected to sample in the fourth quarter with production estimated for the first quarter of 2009. For more information go to www.intel.com/go/ssd.