14 DAY TRIAL // Eager to truly make a mark on the NAND Flash storage market, Intel has just a short time ago revealed that its SSDs would be sold at a special holiday price and that its series of such devices has also grown with the addition of one new member.
The new SSD that the Santa Clara, California-based company has delivered is and X25-M drive with a capacity of 120 GB.
It is built out of 34nm MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory chips and boasts, as one would expect, the 2.5-inch form factor.
Needless to say, Intel's own SSD controller is employed while the means of connecting to the rest of the PC is the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface.
Thanks to this combination of technologies, the newcomer can read data at 250 MB/s and write it at 70 MB/s.
The drive has a price of $249 so, in Intel's own words, it “offers the best dollar-per-GB value in the Intel X25-M SSD line.”
Its maker even decided to cut down the prices of its 80 GB and 160 GB solid state drives. The former now goes for $199 while the latter has a suggested retail price of $415.
“Every Christmas, consumers are looking for the latest tech gadget; this year, with prices dropping, the solid-state drive is becoming more mainstream and can make the single greatest improvement to PC performance,” said Troy Winslow, director of product marketing for the Intel NAND Solutions Group.
“With an SSD, tech shoppers can give the gift of a technology makeover that will help speed up, or breathe new life, into a current PC by just swapping out the hard drive for an SSD,” Winslow added.
It should probably be noted that Intel also has a 40 GB “boot drive” on sale, for a suggested resell price of $99.