UPDATE: Yeah, the new Intel SSDs were announced as expected.

Though it is still VERY early in the morning here on the east coast, I think we have enough leaked information coming across the various wires to agree that Intel is likely to be announcing its updated solid state drives on the 21st of July.  We had been hearing rumors of updated Intel solid state drives for a few months, but it looks like now all the pieces are coming together.

The “Postville” SSDs are going to be using 34nm NAND memory (as opposed to the 50nm used in current Intel drives) and that should allow the company to increase capacity while lowering cost.  One international retailer is showing the updated 80GB drive selling for around $210 compared to the $315 the current Intel X25-M 80GB sells for.  The 160GB model will apparently drop from $640 or so to under $400.  If these prices turn out to be true (and keep in mind that retailer pricing will fluctuate as the “excitement” ebbs and flows) then it would be a big hit to companies like Corsair, OCZ and others that are using Samsung and Indilinx controller-based SSDs that thrive on being priced lower than Intel’s offerings. 

https://pcper.com/images/reviews/616/drive1.jpg
Intel’s original X25-M 80GB SSD – review here

What is not very apparent yet is whether or not the read and write speeds will change with these new models.  Our initial indications said no but at least one early-retailer is showing that the “Postville” models will get a 10-20 MB/s bump in write speeds compared to current generation X25-M drives.  Faithful PC Perspective readers will already know we have a soft heart for Intel’s drives, and even though their rated performance is lower than the speeds of Samsung and Indilinx-based drives, the X25-Ms just tend to perform better overall.  Getting a 10-20 MB/s speed increase on writes (reads remain the same) for a LOWER price would be a welcome move in the quickly growing SSD space.

We are also very eager to hear more about the 320GB model of Intel’s “Postville” solid state drives – though the model is listed on the retailer’s page there is no information on pricing.  I know for a personal perspective that crossing that 300GB level, the same capacity of the high performance VelociRaptor spindle-based hard drive, would definitely give me reason to finally migrate my desktop systems to SSDs. 

Either way, you know we’ll be on top of any changes or announcements being made, so stay tuned!  Allyn has his work cut out for him!

Further Reading: