Intel announces its new PCI-Express SSD family

Intel has finally and officially announced its SSD 910 “Ramsdale” PCI-Express SSD family.

This new product line is the company’s first PCI-Express SSD in the add-on card form-factor. Similarly to the SSD 710 series, the SSD 910 makes use of HET-MLC NAND flash chips and is arranged in four SSD subunits. The design of the SSD 910 is made of three PCBs stacked together, the bottom part using PCI-Express 2.0 x8 bus interface holds the PCI-Express to SAS bridge (a RAID controller) and four SAS/NAND ASICs (SSD controllers). Each controller is then wired to its NAND flash memory chips placed in the other PCBs. The PCIe-SAS bridge is made by LSI.

The SSD 910 series comes in two different capacities: 400 GB and 800 GB. A slight difference is also present between both capacities: the 400 GB variant only has two SSD subunits, providing transfer rates of 1 GB/s reads and 750 MB/s writes, with 90,000 IOPS reads and 38,000 IOPS writes (according to an older article). As for the 800 GB variant, it sports four subunits, providing 2 GB/s reads and 1 GB/s writes, as well as 180,000 IOPS reads and 75,000 IOPS writes.

Price wise, this is aimed at those with the available funds, as the SSD 910 400 GB variant is priced at $1,929 and the 800 GB at $3,859.

Source: HardwareHeaven