Posted on Tuesday, October 05 2010 @ 20:59 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The details of Intel's third-gen X25-M "Postville Refresh" SSD have been published
over at AnandTech. These new 25nm SSDs should deliver roughly double the capacity at the same price as the current 34nm X25-M G2 SSDs. The new disks will be available in capacities of 80/160/300/600GB and promise read speeds of up to 250MB/s (same as before) and write speeds of up to 170MB/s (vs 100MB/s on the G2). The random write performance has been significantly improved, just as the drive lifespan, while one of the new main features is support for AES-128 encryption. The only downside is the increased maximum power consumption.
The new drive uses 25nm IMFT Flash, which means we should get roughly twice the capacity at the same price. While Intel is sampling 25nm MLC NAND today it's unclear whether or not we'll see drives available this year. I've heard that there's still a lot of tuning that needs to be done on the 25nm process before we get to production quality NAND. The third generation drives will be available somewhere in the Q4 2010 - Q1 2011 timeframe in capacities ranging from 40GB (X25-V) all the way up to 600GB.
