Leading chip maker Intel has recently announced that it has begun shipping its high-performance solid-state drive, X-25E, which the company has introduced earlier this year. The Extreme SATA Solid-State Drive has been specifically built to accommodate the requirements of today's server, workstation and storage systems, and, thus, it brings an enhanced level of protection to digital data, as it is built using 50nm single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash memory technology.

Unlike mechanical drives, Intel's new server-oriented SSD is said to lower total cost of ownership for enterprise applications by more than five times. "Hard disk drive performance has not kept pace with Moore's Law," said Kirk Skaugen, general manager, Intel Server Platforms group. "Intel's high-performance SSDs unleash the full performance of the latest Intel Xeon processor-based systems while increasing reliability and lowering the total cost of ownership for a broad range of server and storage workloads."

As a reminder, Intel's server-oriented X-25E SSD will be available in 32GB and 64GB capacities, with prices starting at $695 for sets up to 1000 units. The 64GB model is expected to become available sometime in Q1 next year. As far as performance goes, the 32GB X-25E SATA SSD comes with key features that include 35.000 IOPS (4KB Random Read), 3300 IOPS (4KB Random Write) and 75 microsecond read latency. The product is said to achieve up to 250 MB/s sequential read speeds and up to 170 MB/s sequential write speeds.

The drive itself comes in a 2.5-inch form factor and has a power consumption level of 2.4W in server overload, while in idle mode, the SSD comes with 0.06W power requirements. Other features include S.M.A.R.T commands and additional SSD monitoring for product health. Apparently, Sun Microsystems has already signed up to use Intel's X-25E SSD models in its upcoming server range.