They have up to 480 GB capacities and a 5-year limited warranty

Jul 23, 2014 08:48 GMT  ·  By

Solid state drives are one of Intel's most recent ventures, but Chipzilla is determined to keep strengthening its foothold in this field, so it has released a new collection of them, called SSD Pro 2500.

Most of Intel's solid state drives bear the SSD Pro brand. The chip giant seems particularly fixed on the business and enterprise field, seemingly content to leave the consumer segment to everyone else, with the occasional exception.

The newest additions to the SSD Pro family are called the Intel SSD Pro 2500 Series and have capacities of 120 GB, 240 GB and 480 GB. Note that the storage spaces come in multiples of 10. Many other SSDs use multiples of 8 (128 GB, 256 GB, etc).

Performance-wise, the newcomers are quite fast, being able to read data at 540 MB/s and write it at 490 MB/s. Curiously enough, Intel doesn't say what controller it used here. It can't be SandForce (even though the read/write performance difference matches) because SF-2000 chips can go higher than 540 MB/s for both reading and writing.

Not that the speed gap is all that large. Indeed, it is negligible, especially when factoring in the use of active encryption technology, which could have hit performance where it hurt the most.

According to Intel, all Intel Pro 2500 Series SSDs utilize hardware-based 256-bit encryption that does not affect performance at all.

Moreover, the Trusted Computing Group's OPAL 2.0 client storage technology further safeguards and preserves the integrity of whatever files are stored on the drives.

Coupled with Microsoft eDrive controls, these features not only keep data safe, but also report on drive health and allow a unit to be repurposed after being used in a certain role for an extended period of time (via crypto erase).

All in all, the Intel SSD Pro 2500 Series is packed full of features meant to enhance their usefulness on small and medium businesses, as well as larger corporations that need some fast and reliable storage for their data centers. The annual failure rate is said to be of well under 1%, not the 5% reported for other SSDs and HDDs.

The newcomers ship in both 2.5-inch (normal SATA) and M.2 form factors (finger-sized, made for the new M.2 ports possessed by modern motherboards) and have 5-year limited warranties. Sadly, prices were not revealed, possibly because they are greatly affected by the size of an order and the customer's ability to haggle.