Intel Ups the Ante with new 34nm SSDs

Today, Intel announced an update to its popular line of  X25-M and X18-M (the 1.8-inch version) SSDs. The new versions of the drives will feature 34-nanometer chips that allow the company to significantly lower prices while promising significant performance improvements such as a 25-percent reduction in latency and a “two-fold” increase in random write performance. The new drives will priced at $225 for quantities of up to 1,000 units for the 80GB version and $440 for the 160GB version. How these lower wholesale prices will translate into the cost of getting a notebook with the X25-M preinstalled or purchasing one on the aftermarket is still open to interpretation. Right now,  you can get a first-generation Intel X25-M for $314 at Newegg. Last fall, Intel broke into the SSD market in a huge way, releasing its groundbreaking X25-M SSD, the first mainstream drive to get blazing fast speeds from MLC NAND flash memory. Before that time, there were two types of SSD: extremely expensive drives that used pricey SLC NAND flash and ran as high as $1,000 for 64GB and cheap drives like the original OCZ Core Series that used less expensive MLC memory, but had weak performance. The X25-M upped the ante, proving that with the right controller and firmware, an MLC-based drive could offer blazing fast reads and writes. Since the original X25-M hit the market, other companies have stepped up their game and MLC-based drives have become the standard for notebooks and desktops. In fact, in many respects, the original X25-M had fallen behind the competion, both in terms of performance and price. Drives from the likes of Samsung and OCZ offered similar read speeds, greater capacities, and much faster writes than the X25-M. We can’t wait to get our hands on the new X25-M to see how it fares against the competition.