Intel’s 510 Series SSD sports500 MBps transfer over 6 Gbps SATA

Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: PC / Laptop, Peripherals, Storage

Intel today announced the latest solid-state drive (SSD) family in its product line: the Intel SSD 510 Series, which is also the company's first to use the 6-Gbps SATA III interface.

According to Intel, the drives in the 510 Series offer "the fastest sequential read and write speeds of any consumer SATA SSD available today," and feature read speeds of up to 500 Mbps and write speeds of up to 315 Mbps—respectively more than twice and more than three times the rates of Intel's current 3-Gbps SSDs. (OCZ announced its own 6-Gbps SSD series, the Vertex 3, last week, and made similar performance claims.)

The 510 Series SSDs are constructed using Intel's 34nm NAND Flash memory, and are targeted at gamers, enthusiasts, and professionals (particularly media creators) who need fast transfer rates. Intel claims the 510 Series is just one of a number of major SSD products it plans to introduce in 2011.

In a statement, Pete Hazen, director of marketing for Intel's NAND Solutions Group, said, "The Intel SSD 510 Series helps round out our SSD product line and was specifically designed for applications that require high sequential media transfers. Whether it's a gamer wanting impeccable visual performance and faster game loading, or a performance-intensive workstation user, the new 6Gbps SATA SSD from Intel is not only significantly faster than the top 10,000 RPM gaming HDD, it's also faster than two RAIDed gaming HDDs."

SSDs in the 510 Series are available in capacities of 120GB and 250GB, respectively priced in the channel at $284 and $584 for 1,000-unit quantities. Both drives come with a limited three-year warranty; and the Intel SSD Toolbox, which includes Intel SSD Optimizer software for maintaining the drive's performance.

This article, written by Matthew Murray, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc..