Intel ships enterprise solid-state drive

Not long after releasing the X-25M solid-state drive for general consumers, Intel announced on Wednesday its highest-performing SSD for servers.

The new drive, dubbed X-25E Extreme, shares a lot of similarities with the X-25M, including the 2.5-inch chassis, SATA interface, and 10-channel NAND architecture with Native Command Queuing. However, it features 50nm single-level cell NAND flash memory technology instead of multicell level NAND found in the X-25M.

The result, according to Intel, is that the new X25-E increases server, workstation, and storage system performance by up to 100 times over traditional hard-disk drives when measured in input/output per second (IOPS) metrics. The Intel X-25E offer 35,000 IOPS random read and 3,300 IOPS random write and 75 microsecond read latency. In real-world use, this allows the drive to achieve up to 250 megabytes per second sequential read speed and up to 170 MBps sequential write speed.

The X25-E, currently only available in a 32GB version, is capable of writing up to 4,000TB of data over a three-year period, or 3.7TB per day.

Unlike the X-25M, which can be found in either 2.5-inch or 1.8-inch physical sizes, the high-end X25E is available only in a 2.5-inch size and costs $695. The 64GB version of the drive is expected to be available in first quarter of 2009.