14 DAY TRIAL // Apart for the 300-series Larsen Creek solid state disk that Intel developed specially for Z68 motherboards using the Smart Response caching technology, the Santa Clara chip giant also plans to release four other SSDs in 2011, including the high performance 520 Cherryville consumer drives.
The first SSD drive to make its appearance will be the 710-series Lyndonville that targets the enterprise market and is using high grade 25nm MLC NAND Flash cells to provide between 100GB and 400GB of storage space.
These drives feature a SATA 3Gbps controller and come in the 2.5-inch form factor.
Moving forwards, the start of the third quarter of 2011 will mark the introduction of the 720-series Ramsdale and 300-series Larsen Creek solid state disks.
Although the two drives are remarkably different, both use 34nm SLC NAND, but Ramsdale reaches up to 400GB in capacity and uses a PCI Express 6Gbps controller while Larsen Creek only features 20GB of storage space and a 3Gbps controller.
The last quarter of 2011 will welcome two more solid state drive families, the entry-level Paint Creek drives that will feature an mSATA form factor and the high-performance Cherryville 520-series.
The first of the two will be available with either 40GB or 80GB of storage space, packs a 3Gbps controller and uses MLC NAND cells while the former uses a SATA 6Gbps IC.
Compared to the current 510-series Elmcrest drives, Cherryville raises the maximum storage capacity of Intel's performance solid state drives to 480GB, but also adds a more budget friendly 64GB model to its lineup.
No details regarding pricing are available at this point, but it would be interesting to see how Intel's Cherryville SSDs will perform against the current SandForce SF-2000 based models.
Finally, let's just hope that the added competition will manage to push the SSD prices even lower than they are now. (via engadget)
