Intel Solid-State Drives (SSDs)

Intel began the shipping of its first mainstream solid-state drives (SSDs) in 2008. The first ones were called the X18-M and X25-M with the storage capacity of 80 GB and 160 GB respectively. These MLC-based drives received positive reviews which unanimously stated “high performance”. Intel’s SLC-based Enterprise X25-E Extreme SSDs were released in 2008 too with a storage capacity of 32 GB and 64 GB.

Moving on, Intel introduced X25-M and X18-M lines from a 50-nanometer to a 34-nanometer process in 2009. Dubbed as X25-M and X18-M G2 (generation 2) by the press, these new drives reduced prices by up to 60 percent while offering lower latency and improved performance.

In 2010, Intel entered the budget SSD segment with its X25-V drives with an initial capacity of 40 GB. Providing X25-M G2 performance in a much smaller package, The SSD 310, Intel’s first mSATA drive was released in December 2010. In 2011, it introduced two new SSDs. The first product announcement was called SSD 510 and used an SATA 6 Gigabit per second interface to reach speeds of up to 500 MB/s. The drive was released using 34 nm NAND Flash and came in capacities of 120 GB and 250 GB. The second, the SSD 320 was a successor to Intel’s earlier X25-M was released in capacities of 40, 80, 120, 160, 300 and 600 GB.

Intel, along with Micron announced that they were producing their first 20 nm MLC NAND flash in 2011. Replacing the 510 series, Intel launched the SSD 520 series solid state drives using the SandForce SF-2200 controller with sequential read and write speeds of 550 and 520 MB/s respectively with random read and write IOPS as high as 80,000 in 2012.

2017 saw Intel launching the 900P series Optane SSDs based on 3D XPoint technology as opposed to NAND flash memory. Between DRAM and NAND, lies the price and speed of Optane memory. At announcement, its price was 2x-5x that of SSDs with significantly reduced latency.