Intel has announced that it is now shipping its enterprise X-25E Extreme SATA SSD. The SSD is aimed at server, workstation, and storage systems. Inside the SSD is 50nm single-level cell NAND flash memory. Intel promises over 100 times the workstation and storage system performance compared to traditional HDDs.

In addition to much higher performance, the drives lower energy costs by five times, a significant benefit for large data clusters. Performance of the SSD is impressive with a 32GB SSD performing 35,000 IOPS random read with 4KB files and 3,300 IOPS with 4KB random write. Sequential write speeds are up to 170 MB/s and sequential read speeds are up to 250 MB/s.

“Solid-state drive technology will change the economics of enterprise data centers,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems Group, Sun Microsystems. “SSDs, along with our systems and Solaris ZFS with hybrid storage pools, are important components of the Open Storage initiative. Sun expects to offer enterprise storage solutions that will exploit the breakthrough performance of Intel's High Performance Solid-State Drives and deliver significant performance gains while consuming a fraction of the energy of traditional spinning disk arrays.”

Via Intel