Intel Ships 32 GB Solid-State Drives for Enterprise Storage

Posted by Paul Travis on October 16, 2008

Tags: Infrastructure,  Other

Channel: Data Center, Other

Solid-state drive (SSD) vendors are racing to bring out larger and faster devices. Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC) on Wednesday announced its latest SSD -- a 32 Gigabyte device meant for servers, workstations, and storage systems.

Intel also said it plans to start sending samples of a 64-GB SSD to computer makers later this year and intends to start production of the larger drives early next year. Rival Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Korea: SEC) said earlier this month that its 32-GB and 64-GB SSD drives will be used on Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ)'s ProLiant BL495c virtualization blade server.

Called the Intel X25-E Extreme SATA SSD, the drives feature Intel's 50-nanometer single-level cell NAND flash memory technology, which delivers 35,000 read input/output operations per second and 3,300 write IOPS, according to Intel. The read latency is 75 microseconds. Intel touts the drives' speed, reliability, and low operating costs. It said the SSDs can offer 100 times better performance than conventional hard disk drives, as measured in IOPS. And with no moving parts, the drives use less energy and are less prone to malfunctioning or wearing out. However, they do cost more than conventional hard drives.

IDC estimates that the worldwide SSD market generated nearly $400 million in revenues in 2007, and it forecasts that SSD revenue will grow around 70 percent a year through 2012.