Intel begins shipping enterprise solid-state drive

Not long after releasing the X18-M and X25-M solid state drive for general consumers, Intel has begun shipping the 32GB enterprise-class X25-E Extreme variant, which promises increased server and workstation performance by 100 times compared to traditional hard disk drives.

The new drive features Intel’s 50nm single-level cell NAND flash memory technology, which delivers 35,000 read input/output operations per second and 3,300 write IOPS. In addition to much higher performance, the X25-E Extreme is also said to lower energy costs by five times – active power draw is 2.4 watts, and manages to achieve up to 250MB/s sequential read speeds and up to 170 MB/s sequential write speeds.

Unlike their consumer oriented SSDs, which can be found in 2.5-inch or 1.8-inch physical sizes, the enterprise-class X25-E is available only in a 2.5-inch size and costs $695. A larger 64GB version will go into production in Q4 2008, with availability expected in Q1 2009.