Intel Announces New SSD 510, Promises Speeds Above 500 MBps

When Intel first launched its line of super-fast X25-M SSDs in 2008, the chip-maker broke new ground by offering higher speeds than most of its competitors at prices which were quite reasonable for the time. Over the past couple of years, Intel’s drives have gotten a little bit faster and a whole lot less expensive, but they’ve fallen way behind in the speed race, with write speeds much slower than those offered by other controller-makers such as SandForce, Samsung, and Crucial. Our recent SSD battle royale had Intel’s 120GB X25-M trailing the pack by a wide margin.

However, today, Intel is poised to retake its leadership position with the addition of the new SSD 510 Solid State Drive. Where the old X25-M was capable fo getting 247 MBps sequential reads and 110 MBps sequential writes on a synthetic test, the new SSD 510 claims read speeds in excess of 500 MBps and write speeds as quick as 315 MBps.

In order to take advantage of those higher speeds, the SSDs must be installed in a system with a newer SATA 6 GBps port. Though numerous desktops have SATA 6 GBps ports, at present, the only notebooks with SATA 6 GBps are those with Intel’s new 2nd Generation Core Series processors.

The Intel SSD 510 is available right now in two capacities. A 250GB size is priced at $584 with a 120GB costing $284, both in 1,000-unit quantities.

We just received an Intel SSD 510 to test and look forward to putting it through its paces. So stay tuned for a full review.