14 DAY TRIAL // At the end of last year, Intel has announced a new series of SSDs that promised to deliver the same performance as the rest of the company's solid state drives while coming in a form factor an eighth of the standard 2.5-inch size, so a hardware review website specialized in storage solutions thought about putting Intel's claims to the test.
Dubbed the 310 series, this new line of compact SSDs is destined to be used inside ultra-portable notebooks and other small form-factor devices.
As a result, the drives measure only 50.80mm by 29.85mm and fit inside a mini-PCIe slot, just like the one used for installing Wi-Fi cards.
However, this is a fully-fledged SSD drive that is available with either 40GB or 80GB of storage space, and is capable of reaching sequential read speeds of up to 200MB/s and sequential write speeds of 70 MB/s.
These values place it between the Intel 40GB X25-V and the 80GB X25-M in terms of performance, a more than impressive feat considering its minute size.
Just as its older brothers, the 310 series is powered by Intel's PC29AS21BA0 controller, which is paired together with five 16GB (or 8GB for the 40GB drive) Intel 29F16B08JAMBA flash modules as well as with 32MB of DDR memory, that acts as a fast cache.
As Storage Review reports, the powerful hardware used enabled the drive to deliver impressive performance numbers throughout their tests, leading them to conclude that “this gives users all the performance of a full-size SSD, but without the size associated with the becoming-out-dated 2.5” notebook hard drive bay that was designed around magnetic storage many years ago.”
These are indeed great new for users that are on the lookout for a tablet, a ultra-portable notebook, or other low-power devices that would benefit from the speed increase brought by such an SSD.