Solid-state drives are one-eighth the size of their siblings
Brian Dipert, Senior Technical Editor -- EDN, February 3, 2011
Intel recently announced the
310 Series of m-SATA (mini
serial-advanced-technology-attachment)
solid-state drives
and is currently shipping them in
$99 (1000), 40-Gbyte and $179,
80-Gbyte versions. The drives
deliver performance equivalent
to that of the company’s comparable
34-nm, MLC (multilevel-cell)-
flash-memory-based X25 solid-state drives but at one-eighth
the size. They measure
50.8×29.85 mm, are 4.85 mm
thick, and weigh less than 10g.
Their PCIe (Peripheral Component
Interconnect Express) Mini
Card-based mechanical interfaces
are fully compatible with
1.5- and 3-Mbps SATA protocols,
including NCQ (native-command
queuing).Other features include sustained sequential reads as high as 170 and 200 Mbytes/sec and sustained sequential writes as high as 35 and 70 Mbytes/sec for the 40- and 80-Gbyte versions, respectively. Read latency is 65 μsec for both versions, and write latency is 110 and 75 μsec for the 40- and 80-Gbyte versions, respectively. Random 4-kbyte reads are, respectively, as high as 25,000 and 35,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second); respective random 4-kbyte writes are 2500 and 6600 IOPS. The devices have a life expectancy of 1.2 million MTBF (mean time between failures), a typical power consumption of 150 mW in active mode and 75 mW in idle mode, and an operating-temperature range of 0 to 70°C.
Intel Corp
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