Samsung has quietly begun shipping a new range of solid-state drives featuring the company's latest 30nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory and a multi-core controller chip built in-house. The 470 series just became available in the U.S. via Newegg.com in 64, 128, and 256GB capacities with prices of $160, $320, and $600, respectively.

According to the company's spec sheet, the new series can handle sequential read rates of 250MB/s, sequential writes up to 220MB/s, and are capable of up to 31,000 IOPS (Input-output operations per second) during random reads and 21,000 IOPS for random writes. As it is often the case, however, the lower capacity model is a little slower than the other two. The 64GB drive is only rated for 170MB/s sequential writes and 11,000 IOPS during random writes.


Other than that they all share the same features, including a 2.5-inch brushed aluminum casing with orange accents, a SATA 3Gbps interface, TRIM support, a MTBF (mean time before failure) of 1.5 million hours, resistance to shocks of up to 1500G, and a three-year warranty.