14 DAY TRIAL // Expected to arrive in the fourth quarter of this year, Intel's first PCI Express solid state drive, known under the code name of Ramsdale, was just spotted at the IDF 2011 event where it promised to deliver transfer speeds up to 2.2GB/s.
The SSD was first uncovered at the end of April, and form what we have managed to find out about the drive it will use a PCI Express 6Gbps controller as well as 34nm SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash.
Intel will offer two versions of the drive, one featuring 200GB and the other 400GB of storage space, but both of these will rely on a PCI Express x4 interface in order to communicate with the host system.
Little is known at this point in time about the controller that is going to be used for Ramsdale, but this is expected to arrive as an SSD-RAID solution and will feature 512MB of DRAM memory for caching purposes.
According to Hardwareluxx, this configuration is expected to deliver sequential transfer speeds of up to 2.2GB/s in read mode and 1.8GB/s in write mode. The 4K random read and write performance of Ramsdale is not yet known.
720 Series solid state drives will be Intel's first PCI Express SSDs, and these will have to compete with similar solutions manufactured by companies such as OCZ and Micron.
The latter has announced in June one of the most impressive PCIe SSDs to date, the RealSSD P320h, which uses a native PCI Express SSD controller (Micron is the first company to use this type of IC) capable of delivering impressive performance without having to rely on RAID.
Just as mentioned at the beginning of this article, Intel plans to release the first Ramsdale 720-Series PCI Express solid state drives in the fourth quarter of this year.