Intel 34-nm SSDs Officially Launched, Cheaper
They're the same, only newer, cheaper and faster.
Yesterday we brought you word that new Intel SSDs were on their way, which is true, but sadly not with as much new hotness as we had hoped.
Intel today announced its more advanced Solid State Drive built using the 34-nm manufacturing process. The new technology will replace the old drives that used the 50-nm process.
Intel isn't introducing any new products just yet. In fact, the new drives using the more advanced technology will be using the exact same model names as the previous generation - Intel X25-M available in 80 GB and 160 GB versions.
Intel said that keeping with the same product number because the focus for this new generation was in manufacturing, not so much performance (even though early numbers show a small speed boost).
Compared to its previous 50-nm version, the new Intel X25-M offers improved latency and faster random write Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). Specifically, Intel's new SSD provides a 25 percent reduction in latency, for quicker access to data, operating at 65-microsecond latency compared to approximately 4,000 microseconds for an HDD.
"Our goal was to not only be first to achieve 34nm NAND flash memory lithography, but to do so with the same or better performance than our 50nm version," said Randy Wilhelm, Intel vice president and general manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group. "We made quite an impact with our breakthrough SSDs last year, and by delivering the same or even better performance with today's new products, our customers, both consumers and manufacturers, can now enjoy them at a fraction of the cost."
The move to 34nm will help lower prices of the SSDs up to 60 percent. New channel prices for the X25-M 80 GB are $225 for quantities up to 1,000 units. The 160 GB version is $440 (down from $945 at introduction) for quantities up to 1,000 units.
Oh, and how can you tell if which X25-M you might be buying? The new ones are silver while the old ones are black.

SSDs still have a ways to go before I'd consider them useful. As is, they'd have to be LESS money than some of the higher end HDDs for me to consider... and given those are around $1.3 for Gigabyte... I agree with The_Blood_Raven. These drives would need to be priced at roughly $1 per gigabyte for me to be interested. As ridiculous as that might sound to some...
Cheers for the price drop! I only pay $100 for my HD's though and my old 74gb raptor is still running strong. Keep bringing those prices down!
The new drives have a different part number. At newegg, both Intel X25-M models are listed as either unavailable or sold out. I expect they have been draining their stock for the past few weeks and will explicitly list the new drives soon.
Sexy, actually a decent price, and great performance. Who doesn't want one? SSD's should hit the consumer market heavily soon if this rate keeps up.
I am just wondering why Seagate and WD have not come forward with their entries yet - I hope it means they will have something big price/performance wise when they do announce.
The Raptor was maybe 20% faster than a regular hd whereas this thing should be at least 200% faster.
Well the best a SAS drive can do is about 150 IOPS while the Intel SSD's can get up to 36000 read and about 6000 Writes. Also the latency is almost none existence and they do draw significantly less power. Also you can use the ICH that is almost in every device to achieve a great RAID config without paying for an expansive controller.
your numbers are highly exaggerated... there's a reason why commercial and industrial workstation installations still use SCSI and SAS over SATA and SSDs...
Wrong. The reason that mid to high-end servers and workstations still use SCSI (including SAS and FC) has nothing to do with performance figures, exaggerated or not. You can get fast or slow drives using any interface. The SCSI protocol has RAS (Reliability, Availability, Serviceability) features that the SATA protocol lacks. That is the only reason that SATA drives of any kind, SSD or otherwise, aren't used in mid to high-end servers and workstations. And yes, SAS SSDs do exist, check out the STEC ZeusIOPS line of SAS and FibreChannel(!) SSD drives. If you think these Intel SSDs are expensive, though, check those STEC drives out. Make sure you're sitting down, first, don't want you to hit your head when you faint after you see the price.
cant afford performance? buy mainstream
For the first time their "Extreme" label doesn't mean 5x price premium