Today, Intel announced its third generation of SSD, the 320 series, which now goes up to 600GB, doubling the capacity of its models one year ago.

Intel has announced its third generation of Solid-State Drives (SSD), the 320 Series, which double the capacity of last years models to 600GB. Still, for many models, prices have dropped as much as 20 percent from last year, despite the increases in capacity (consumer prices may vary). It seems that Moore’s Law can’t be beat. The 320 series will replace Intel’s current X25-M SSDs and utilize the new 25nm NAND Flash memory process that Intel unveiled last year. The new drives are intended for laptop and desktop computers.

Intel promises better data security (128-bit encryption), power-loss management, and new data redundancy features. The new drives come in the following sizes and prices. All drives come with a 3 year warranty.

  • $89 – 40GB
  • $159 – 80GB
  • $209 – 120GB
  • $289 – 160GB
  • $529 – 300GB
  • $1,069 – 600GB

While still expensive, SSD prices are dropping quickly and capacity is rising faster still. SSD drives offer much faster boot times and data access speeds than traditional spinning hard drives.

TechTree linked to a great Intel video in its report. Check it out below. For more detailed information on Intel’s new drives, head to its product page.

Showing 6 comments

  1. Ian Bell at 10:18am 29th March 2011 At least it looks like prices are coming down. I was blown away when Apple wanted like $500-600 to add a 160GB SSD drive.
  2. frank rizzoe at 10:09am 29th March 2011 one fact that will never change, regardless of how low the price gets, is these harddrives shrink in storage space every time you write to them. the chips can only be written to once in any given location. you can erase the data, but that space "has given the ultimate sacrifice". this will also lead to fragmented storage space, and you cannot fix that by the old "defrag" effort.
    1. frank rizzoe at 10:09am 29th March 2011 booting up is slower on 7200rpm hd, but the 7200rpm hybrid drives that use the chip for bootup boot up just as fast, and are a lot cheaper! They didn't think to include that small bit of important information. also, "data access speeds are faster"
    2. cwebersd at 11:18am 29th March 2011 This is so wrong on so many levels! MLC Flash cells can be written to and erased between 3500 times for the newest and smallest ones used here (25 nm) to 10,000 times for the older ones (50 nm) until they no longer hold a charge reliably. With the controllers in these SSDs you will likely not reach that maximum for the lifetime of the drive itself. We have tried hard to kill (or at least reduce in writeable size) a current generation SSD and failed. I have deployed half a dozen SSDs in user laptops for months now, and none have had the slightest issue. And don't get me started about "fragmentation". SSDs write all over the place for wear leveling and make the OS think it is all contiguous - doesn't matter, it works just fine, better in fact than spinning hard drives which benefit to be defragged every now and then. So, let's stop spreading misinformation.
  3. Robert Germscheid at 9:39am 29th March 2011 why is this ssd limited to notebooks and desktops? If some rack systems are saying out of the box OEM drives will work for enterprise storage mix and match how would this not play. Is it a reliability issue? Heat issue? Why can I not put this drive into a 200TB rack with mixed media? I see several applications here for tcp/ip 10gb storage array for a database application with raid.
    1. Clinton at 10:35am 29th March 2011 Reason being they aren't for servers and databases is because each bit of memory can only be written to x amount of times ( like 100,000) times which seems like a lot, but databases rewrite info many times I a cycle, and there can be hundreds or thousands a day. So that ssd may only be usable for a year or two. They also don't recomend defragmenting because of the write cycle limitation. Do some research and you will see what I'm talking about
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