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Intel finally delivers a SATA solid-state drive

Intel has finally announced its own SATA solid-state drive for notebook and desktop clients.

Justin Yu Associate Editor / Reviews - Printers and peripherals
Justin Yu covered headphones and peripherals for CNET.
Justin Yu

Intel finally announced its own SATA solid-state drive for notebook and desktop clients, and our secured lab has become a feeding frenzy of folks geeking out on the X25-M, just one of the SSD drives Intel introduced Tuesday at its Developer Forum in San Francisco.

The mainstream SSDs will come in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch models and both will use standard multilevel cell NAND flash memory that will hopefully translate to a lower cost-per-bit for the consumer.

As of the time of this announcement, Intel hasn't released pricing. We're crossing our fingers that the company will eventually price these drives within a reasonable range for the average consumer; most current 64GB SSDs fall around $800.

Along with the 80GB drive, Intel also sent over its own system benchmarks that show a 50 percent improvement in system performance as well as a 9x improvement in HDD performance. We'll obviously put these numbers to the test and report our own benchmark results along with a full review in early September.