Intel 710 Series SSD prices leaked

According to VR-Zone Intel’s latest “Lydonville” SSDs will be the 710 series which will have a cost per Gigabyte of much lower than previous generation of Corporate standard SSDs. The new drives come in 100, 200 and 300GB sizes with prices of $650, $1250 and $1900 respectively. Expensive though these drives may seem they have a very different purpose to consumer grade SSDs. They have endurance much greater than standard consumer grade SSDs for example the 100GB model has an endurance of 500TB, the 200GB model has an endurance of 1024TB and 1500TB for the 300GB model. Whereas most consumer grade SSDs might only have an endurance of 10-20TB on the same sized drives.

A 64MB cache is featured with user-controlled “over-provisioning” which allows for worn out cells to be replaced. The drives read at 270MB/s and write at 210MB/s which isn’t impressive by any standards but endurance and reliability is what Intel is going for and these speeds are still good. They also run off the SATA II 3GB/s interface so there is no need to make the costly upgrade to SATA III for the corporate customers this is aimed at. The warranty these drives come with is only 3 years however, compared to 5 years on the 320 series consumer grade drives. So clearly the intention is for these drives to be used intensively for a short period of time before then being replaced when the next generation of corporate Intel SSDs come out.