Intel SSD 330 Series Announced

Intel has just announced its Intel SSD 330 Series, a line of SSD (solid state drives) aimed at those who seek a good performance/price ratio. Drives will be produced with capacities of 60GB ($89), 120GB ($149) and 180GB ($234). It is no secret that solid state drives can boost perceived performance tremendously, but their relative high price can be intimidating. Starting at $1.25 per GB, the SSD 330 Series comes with low capacities which opens the SSD market to those who seek high-performance, without caring much for high-capacity, or to those who have always wanted to build a RAID array to get an extremely high throughput, without breaking the bank. This could also be a great update for an aging laptop.The Intel SSD 330 is manufactured with a 25nm silicon process, and Intel is claiming some rather interesting performance numbers: close to 500MB/sec in random reads and writes, up to 33k IO operations per second in write mode (25k in read mode) and a power consumption somewhere between 600 mW and 850 mW. Of course, it can connect to a 6Gb/sec SATA port.

Unless you have a laptop, the typical strategy is to use an SSD to store the operating system and temporary files, while putting the big files on a large HDD (hard-disk drive). In practical terms, most people can benefit from zappy boot and app loading, while still having ample space. The 4X RAID option seems particularly attractive for those who want a massive boost in throughput. If you just won the jackpot, check the “enterprise-grade” PCIe-based Intel SSD 910. How would you use the Intel SSD 330?

Hubert Nguyen
Categories: Breaking
Tags: Intel, ssd, Storage