Oct 6, 2010 09:59 GMT  ·  By

As consumers may or may not know, Intel entered the solid state drive (SSD) market some time ago and has been preparing new models based on its 25nm manufacturing process, SSDs which, according to recent leaks, have now been detailed.

Solid State Drives may not be as capacious as hard drives yet, but they are more reliable, can be more compact and, most importantly, are much faster.

So far, the most popular and powerful such storage units are those based on the SandForce controller chips.

Intel's upcoming series will be known, according to AnandTech, the G3 and will be aimed at consumers with PCs outfitted with the SATA 3.0 Gbps interface.

They will be known as the X18-M and X25-M and will be capable of reading data at 250 MB/s and writing it at 170 MB/s.

The 4K random read and write performance will also be considerable, at 50,000 IOPS and 40,000 IOPS, respectively.

What's more, both of them will be equipped with full disk AES 128-bit encryption support, so that data security may also be among their assets.

The solid state drives will be available, of course, in multiple capacities, including 80 GB, 160 GB, 300 GB and, for the X25-M, 600 GB.

There was also mention of the X25-E G3 drives, which utilize eMLC NAND Flash memory chips instead of MLC.

These models also reach 600 GB but have a higher write speed, of 200 MB/s to be precise, as well as a 4K random performance of 50,000 IOPS for both read and write.

What remains to be seen is how these products fare on the market once they do become available.

The answer to this dilemma should even emerge soon, knowing that all models should make it to market either during the ongoing fourth quarter of 2010 or around the start of 2011.