Intel rocked the Solid State Drive market when it launched its MLC-based X25-M SSD a few months ago. The performance was unmatched at the time, a few SLC devices could keep up on some levels. Intel announced that it was working on an even faster model that would use Single-level Cell technology for even better performance. This unit, Intel X25-E, is on the way and the first benchmarks have now been posted and they look promising.
In the forums over at overclockers.co.uk they have published a couple of HD Tach results that show the strength of the SLC technology, read speeds of around 230MB/s is not especially breathtaking, but the write speed of 210MB/s is really something out of the ordinary.
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They also decided to slap two of them together in a RAID 0 configuration that more than doubled the transfer rate more than 500MB/s. The idea of a storage system connected with the new SuperSpeed USB technology certainly sounds appealing.
There is a rather big catch though. Intel has priced the drives pretty high as 80GB X25-M (MLC) will run you around $600, while the 32GB X25-E cost an additional $100. Though Intel has announced that it will lower prices considerably in December, but they will most likely still be a bit too expensive to expect for Christmas.
