IDG News Service - Intel on Wednesday announced the new 710 series solid-state drives, which the company is pitching as a replacement for hard drives in enterprise servers.
The SSDs will come with capacities ranging from 100GB to 300GB and include features to protect data and enhance the life of the drives. The drives replace the previous X25-E SSDs, which were also targeted at enterprises, and have 30 times more endurance.
The drives are priced starting at $649 for the 100GB version to $1,929 for the 300GB drive, when purchased in quantities of 1,000. The drive was announced at the Intel Developer Forum being held in San Francisco.
The drives are MLC (multilevel cell) SSDs, which store bits of data at multiple levels in each cell, but provide the endurance of typical single-level cell (SLC) SSDs, where a bit of data is stored per cell. SLCs are considered faster and more reliable than MLCs in terms of endurance cycles.
The SSD achieves a random write performance, measured in 4K blocks, of up to 2,700 I/O operations per second (IOPS) and read performance of up to 38,500 IOPS. It has a write endurance of up to 1.1 petabytes.
The Intel SSD 710 includes a technology called HET (high endurance technology), which combines firmware enhancements, management features and algorithms to reduce data errors, Intel said.
The SSDs will be offered with Cisco's UCS B230 M2 two-socket server starting in September, Intel and Cisco said in a joint statement.
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