14 DAY TRIAL // Unlike on the motherboard market, Intel doesn't intend to slow down development and release of solid-state drives, hence the arrival of a new collection of SSDs for the enterprise market segment.
Said new collection is known as Intel Solid-State Drive Pro 1500 Series and has been unveiled at the IDF 2013 (Intel Developer Forum). The event is taking place from September 10 to September 12 at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.
With this, Intel hopes to bring the enterprise and industrial segments closer to replacing their HDD storage arrays with SSDs.
Maximum sequential transfer rates are of 540 MB/s when reading and 490 MB/s when writing, going down with each capacity step.
Speaking of which, the new line is made of 80 GB, 120 GB, 180 GB, 240 GB, and 360 GB, both in 2.5-inch and M.2 form factor (narrow and long, not too unlike DRAM modules).
Security is another thing the Santa Clara, California-based company emphasized, implementing hardware-based 256-bit AES encryption and industry-standard Opal key management protocols.
Moreover, the Stable Image Platform Program is included, which installs key drivers for easy transition to the SSDs.
Then, there's the remote management support, involving diagnosing of issues at drive levels, reducing the number of deskside visits on the part of companies' PC maintenance divisions.
Other details that enterprise IT, managers might want to know are input/output operations per second (IOPS) of up to 80K, a low-power mode that reduces power draw compared to HDDs by 90%, and “tight integration with Intel vPro technology,” which is another way of saying that the new storage devices work best with Intel Haswell CPUs.
Of course, since AMD doesn't actually have many chips used in enterprise applications, the extra mention is a bit superfluous, although I suppose it acts as a good “stealth”-ad to fourth-generation Core-series CPUs.
Intel's SSD Pro 1500 drives work in all sorts of enterprise scenarios, from data centers to ultrabooks and 2-in-1 laptops.
"By improving security, manageability and TCO, the Professional Family of Intel SSDs will enable more mobile devices such as vPro technology-powered PCs to further penetrate the enterprise while delivering faster start-up and improved battery life," said Rick Echevarria, vice president of PC Client Group and general manager of business client platform division at Intel.