Intel has just announced an SSD family based on the PCIe expansion-card form factor and interface. The SSD family is called the 910 Series and it’s based on Intel High Endurance Technology and MLC (multi-level cell) 25nm NAND flash memory that allows up to 10 full drive writes a day for 5 years. Intel’s press release says that’s a 30x endurance improvement over its standard MLC-based flash products. The result is an SSD with a 5-year warranty. The 400Gbyte version of the Intel SSD 910 Series costs $1,929 and the 800Gbyte version costs $3,859.
According to this article on the Anandtech.com site, the Intel 910 Series uses an 8-lane PCIe 2.0 implementation (with a raw PCIe bandwidth of 4Gbytes/sec in each direction). The rated peak sequential read/write performance for the PCIe-based 910 Series SSDs is 2000/1000 and 1000/750Mbytes/sec respectively for the 800 and 400Gbyte family members and the peak random read/write performance is 180/75K IOPS for and 90/38K IOPS respectively for the 800 and 400Gbyte family members.
Also according to the Anandtech article, the Intel 910 SSD Series employs either two or four SSD controller ASICs with dual-core processors. One processor core handles the ONFI 2.0 interface to the NAND Flash devices and the other processor core handles the “SAS interface.”
What’s that? Isn’t the Intel 910 SSD Series based on PCIe? Yes, it is but there’s apparently a PCIe-to-SAS bridge connected to that PCIe connector.
And here’s a photo of the product:
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