Will improve on the specs of the current 510 series drives

Sep 12, 2011 13:40 GMT  ·  By

Intel has managed to make quite a name for itself in the solid state drive market, and the company will continue to push forward in this space with the introduction of the high-performance 520 SSD series that is targeting enthusiasts and high-end desktop computer systems.

The new solid state drive series is also known under the code name of Cherryville and it uses a controller with native support for the SATA 6Gbps interface.

According to VR-Zone, Cherryville was designed in order to spread the series in capacities, so Intel has now raised the storage space available on the high-end model from 250GB in Elmcrest (aka the 510 Series) to 480GB.

Furthermore, 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, 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.

Of course, the 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).

In addition to SATA 6Gbps support, the controller used by Intel will also be compliant with all the latest technologies employed in solid state drives including SMART, TRIM and NCQ.

The drives also add support for native 256-bit AES data encryption as well as end-to-end data protection. MTBF is rated at 1.2 million hours.

Intel is expected to start production of the 520 SSD series in the fourth quarter of 2011, but no details regarding market availability were provided at this point in time.

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