14 DAY TRIAL // The first rumors about Intel's high-performance Cherryville SSD, which is said to come as a replacement for the current 510-Series drives, made it our way quite a few months ago, but Intel has now finally made these SSDs official during a presentation held at IDF 2011.
The new solid state drives will be released into the 520 product series and use a controller with native support for the SATA 6Gbps interface, manufactured by either Intel or a third party.
Compared to the current 510 SSD, Cherryville will spread the series in capacities as Intel is preparing no less than four drives based on this design, the top model coming with 480GB of storage space, a major change from the 250GB available in Elmcrest (aka the 510 Series).
At the other end of the spectrum, the Cherryville line of solid state drives will also witness the introduction of a lower 60GB model, which should be a great option for user seeking a fast boot drive for their system.
As far as performance is concerned, Intel's slides have revealed that sequential read and write transfer rates are expected to reach 530MB/s and 490MB/s, while random performance is rated at 40,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) read and 45,000 IOPS write.
Just like always, these figures will vary depending on the capacity of the drive and on the number of channels populated with NAND Flash.
Speaking of NAND Flash, Intel's 520 series SSDs will use 25nm multi-level cell (MLC) memory manufactured by IMFT (the Intel-Micron joint venture) and will also get support for native 256-bit AES data encryption.
The other SSD to be disclosed by Intel is known under the code name of Hawley Creek and is designed to be used together with Z68 motherboards as a fast caching drive for HDDs.
Hawley Creek will use MLC NAND Flash and is expected to launch in the fourth quarter of this year, just like the Cherryville SSD series. (via AnandTech)
