14 DAY TRIAL // There seems to be some activity over at Intel's labs, only this time it is not centered around a new CPU or another, but around the newest set of solid state drives, built out of the company's most advanced type of NAND chips yet.
Solid state drives are still nowhere near the most capacious hard disk drives in terms of storage space, but the rest of their feature set has been advancing quite quickly.
One thing that has been visible over the last year was the rapid advancement to better chip manufacturing processes.
The one node that is being employed in the making of the new 320 Series (Postville Refresh) units is the one of 25 nm.
It should have still taken a while for the first batch of shipments to be ready, but a report by VR-Zone now implies that the release will be done ahead of schedule.
Specifically, official availability is now expected on March 28, at which point the storage devices should start being used in data centers, embedded markets, SMBs (small to medium businesses) and consumer systems.
For those that want specifications, there will be models with 40 GB, 80 GB, 120 GB, 160 GB, 300 GB and 600 GB of storage space, respectively.
All of them have full AES 128 bit hardware encryption, random 4 KB write of up to 23,000 IOPS, random 4 KB read of 39,500 IOPS and enhanced power loss management. There is also mention of an MTBF of 1.2 million hours.
The new collection of SSDs is dubbed 320 Series Gen3 and will replace the existing X25-V and X25-M lines while sticking to the same prices.
This means that users will have to part with $109 (40 GB), $189 (80 GB), $239 (120 GB), $329 (160 GB), $569 (300 GB) and $1119 (600 GB).