Intel is once again looking to further enhance its position in the corporate market, this time by bringing new products to its client line up. They are readying the codename “Cherryville” 520 series solid state drives for their client enterprise-based market. The reason for doing so is to bring both higher and lower capacity enterprise drives than its previous 510 series drives which were only available in 120GB and 250GB versions. The drives capitalise on the latest solid state technologies such as the SandForce 22xx series controllers, SATA III 6GB/s support and compliance for TRIM, SMART, NCQ and ACS-2.
The 520 series drives are rated for read speeds of 530MB/s and write speeds of 490MB/s which is about as fast as you can get off the current generation of SandForce controllers and they come in a very wide range of capacities: 60GB, 120GB, 160GB, 240GB and 480GB which should allow Intel to hit a wider variety of price points with their enterprise solid state drives. The IOPs are 45K for write and 40K for read, and the drive is built from the latest high quality 25nm MLC NAND flash memory chips. The MTBF is 1.2 million hours, operating temperature stability is within 0 and 70 degrees whilst the drives can take vibration shocks of up to 2.7 G (RMS). Production begins in Q4 of 2011, October onwards.
