14 DAY TRIAL // Intel has recently informed its partners that the company will discontinue all solid state drives from the X25-M and X25-V series as these will be replaced with the company's new 320-series SSDs.
The product change notification was issued just a few days earlier and reads: “due to migration of Intel X25-M/X25-V SSD (34nm) to the next generation Intel SSD 320 Series, the previous generation 34nm Intel X25-M and X25-V SSD will be discontinued.”
The company's partners can still place orders for these drives until August 15, 2011, while the last shipment date is set for November 15, 2011.
Intel has launched the second-generation X25-M solid state drives in the second half of 2009 and, since then, these have proven to be very popular among consumers.
However, at the end of March, the Santa Clara company released its third-generation SSDs, known as the 320 Series, which use an improved controller as well as 25nm NAND Flash.
This change allowed Intel to lower retail prices, while the improved controller and firmware had an important role in increasing the performance of the drives.
Intel's 320 SSD Series is comprised of six models with capacities ranging from 40GB to 600GB and all the models use the SATA 3Gbps interface.
The fastest SSDs are able to reach sequential read and write speeds of 270MB/s and 220MB/s, respectively as well as 39,500 input/output operations per second (IOPS) random reads and 23,000 IOPS random writes.
Prices start at $89, for the 40GB model, and go all the way up to $1,069, for the 600GB model, while their warranty has just been extended to 5 years.
In addition to the X25-M and X25-V, Intel has also discontinued the X25-E (50nm) 32GB and 64GB SSD models. These can be ordered until July 11, 2011 and the last shipping date is set for October 3, 2011.