Intel just announced a new X25-M Solid State Disk drive that utilizes relatively cheap multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory to deliver a 80GB drive for $595 at quantity.

“The first of these SSDs to hit the market will be the X25-M, which boasts an impressive 250MB/s sustained read rate, a 70MB/s sustained write rate, 80GB of storage capacity in a 2.5″ form factor, and support for Native Command Queuing.”

“… the Intel drive’s whopping 250MB/s sustained read rate quickly puts things into perspective. That’s more than twice the sustained read throughput of the latest desktop WD VelociRaptor and leagues ahead of the fastest mobile competition. (For comparison, the SLC-based 64GB Samsung FlashSSD we reviewed not long ago is rated for 100MB/s sustained reads and 80MB/s writes.) Finally, we have a drive capable of exploiting its 300MB/s Serial ATA interface.

While we’re embarassing the VelociRaptor, we should note that the X25-M has a read latency of just 85 microseconds. That’s 0.085 milliseconds, if we convert to units more commonly associated with hard drives. For comparison, the random access time of the VelociRaptor is 7.4 milliseconds—a difference of two orders of magnitude.”

Finally, one of the common concerns with flash-based memory is the limited write/erase cycles possible with the media. Based on Intel’s figures, that problem appears to be becoming less and less of an issue.

“Intel estimates that the 80GB X25-M will last for five years with “much greater than” 100GB of write-erase per day.”

I’ll take 4 of these in a RAID 0, please.