14 DAY TRIAL // There does not seem to be as much of a concern for internal competition among Intel solid state drives, considering the new unit that the company's lineup has now welcomed.
Intel's SSD 300 series (320 and 330 sub-lines) is the storage product set that the Santa Clara, California-based company sells to mainstream customers.
Meanwhile, the SSD 520 line, as the high-end collection, achieves a superior performance and capacity.
The main reason why the SSD 320 and 330 lines didn't have drives with more than 200 GB was the need to preserve a clear difference between them and the 520.
Large-scale price cuts have been happening for a while now, which means there is enough space for a 240 GB SSD 330 device.
The drive comes in the 2.5-inch form factor and is only 9.5mm thick, or 0.37 inches, give or take.
The LSI SandForce controller gives it a read speed of 500 MB/s and a writing speed of 450 MB/s, while the random 4K performance is of 42,000 IOPS (reading) and 52,000 IOPS (writing).
All in all, this is definitely the new 330 flagship, taking away that position from the 180 GB.
Unfortunately, the pricing scheme has not been disclosed, but there should be several marks once availability ramps up. The corporation will sell it in bulk, as drive-only trays, drive-only retail packages and retail packages with migration kits and 3.5-inch bay adapters (for desktops).
And now, for the price cuts. They were reported last week, but only now have they come into effect.
In the 320 series, the 300 GB version has gone down from $520 (€422.86) to about $465 (€378). The 600 GB one now cost $879 (€720), around 17% less than before ($1059 / €861).
The other major price reductions were in the 520 line, but we've already covered that at length here.