14 DAY TRIAL // Intel may not have sold as many solid state drives as companies that focus exclusively on memory/storage products, but this side-business is apparently progressing well enough that an all-new collection is on the way.
There is word going around the Internet about an impending replacement for the Intel Larson Creek solid state drive collection.
That is to say, Intel is going to soon release a new range of solid state drives, around the same time as the Ivy Bridge central processing units (CPUs) and the 7-Series chipset motherboards.
That would have meant June at the earliest if the rumors were true about Ivy Bridge chips getting delayed.
Fortunately, only some dual-core models have been pushed back, which means that the ETA (estimated time of arrival) is April, 2012.
The line of SSDs that will replace Larson Creek (Series 311) will be called 313 and will utilize SLC NAND Flash memory chips (SLC stands for single-level cell).
The codename is Hawley Creek and the chips are being constructed using the 25nm manufacturing process instead of 34nm.
Two capacity options are planned, though they are very peculiar: 20 GB and 24 GB. There is no clue as to why the Santa Clara, California-based company saw the need for two capacity options when the difference is just 4 GB.
The performance is still unknown, but the read and write speeds should at least be slightly higher than those of the existing models.
That said, Intel does not intend for these products to be sold to consumers like other drives, but as means to enable SSD caching.
In such configurations, the SSD holds the operating system and lets the bulk of the other data be stored on an HDD, to boost access and boot times, while the OS views the two distinct drives as a single partition.