14 DAY TRIAL // Together with the Z68 chipset, that saw the light of day just a few hours ago, Intel has also launched its 311-series Larson Creek solid state disk, that was designed to come as a companion for the SSD caching feature introduced in its latest chipset.
The first details about Larson Creek emerged at the beginning of this month, and, since then, the drive has been priced as well as benchmarked ahead of its official launch.
However, the good news is that the first benchmarks to appear after its launch seem to confirm the result that circulated around the Web just a couple of days ago.
I say good news since, even though the SSD packs only 20GB of storage space, its performances are well above those of an entry-level drive.
In fact, Aanadtech's review, found the 311-series Larson Creek SSD to reach sequential write speeds higher than those achieved by the 160GB version of the Intel X25-M G2.
Furthermore, its sequential read speed surpassed drives such as the Crucial m4 256GB or the Corsair Force F120, results which seem to be confirmed by its IOPS performance.
This was possible since Intel has decided to built the drive using SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash, which offers faster read and write transfer rates as well as better reliability than the MLC (multilevel cell) Flash used in most consumer SSDs.
The only downside to using such memory chips, is that these are far more expensive than their MLC counterparts, which lead to the impressive $109 price tag that is associated with the Larson Creek SSD.
Fortunately, the Z68 Smart Response SSD caching technology is compatible with any SSD that uses the SATA interface, or mSATA if the motherboard comes with such a slot, so consumers aren't forced to go with Intel's drive if they don't want to.
