A leaked roadmap earlier this year showed Intel was planning to release a successor to their 510 Series SSD that would come in 64GB through 480GB flavors and use the latest-gen SATA 6Gb/s interface. The company confirmed those plans during Intel Developer Forum 2011 and now we have some fresh details courtesy of VR-Zone, which suggests a specific launch date and performance estimates for the so-called "Cherryville" 520 Series drive.

According to the report Intel's 520 Series will arrive on November 4, 2011. It will make use of 25 nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory and should provide more capacity choices than its predecessor, as well as higher throughput and lower latencies. Specifically, VR-Zone quotes sequential read rates of 520 MB/s and sequential writes of 500 MB/s, with around 40,000 IOPS for random 4K reads and writes. These figures tend to vary between the different SSD size variants, so we'll have to wait until the final specifications for each specific model are released.

The 520 Series SSD will reportedly come in 60GB, 120GB, 180GB, 240GB and 480GB capacities. By comparison, the current 510 Series (reviewed here) is available only in 120 GB and 250 GB variants, and offers up to 500MB/s and 315MB/s read and write speeds, respectively, with the higher capacity model – up to 450MB/s and 210MB/s in the 120GB version.

There's no word on pricing at the moment, unfortunately. Looking further ahead the next generation of 500 series drives, codenamed King Crest, will be based on 20nm NAND chips and should arrive sometime in Q2 2012.