14 DAY TRIAL // The first bits and pieces of information regarding Intel's upcoming Larson Creek SSDs emerged just a little less than a week ago, and now some photos of the upcoming drive have already made their way on the Web, accompanied by some early benchmarks and pricing details.
The 311-series Larson Creek SSD has been specially developed to be used together with motherboards supporting Intel's Smart Response technology, a hard drive caching algorithm which is part of the Intel Rapid Storage Technology v10.5.
This is one of the main features brought by the company's upcoming Z68 chipset and it allows consumers to join an SSD drive with a hard drive and use the former as a fast cache for improving the storage performance of the system.
Moving back to the Larson Creek solid state drive, this will be available in two different form factors, 2.5-inch SATA and mSATA, both offering 20GB of storage space.
No matter what version one winds up choosing, Larson Creek SSDs will be using SLC (single-level cell) NAND Flash, which offers faster read and write transfer rates as well as better reliability at the expense of a higher manufacturing cost.
The fast Flash memory chips seem to help a lot with the performance of the drive, as one benchmark that made its way online seems to prove.
The numbers provided are way above what one could expect from such a small capacity drive as the 311-series SSD manages to reach 198MB/s read and 113MB/s write sequential speeds.
Outside of the Z68 PCH, Larson Creek is also compatible with the HM67 and QM67 mobile chipsets.
According to VR-Zone, pricing will be established at a less than stellar $119 USD, which makes it just as expensive with some higher-capacity SSDs that also manage to provide similar read and write transfer speeds.
