Intel on Monday announced it is expanding its X25-M 2.5-inch and X18-M 1.8-inch SATA solid-state drive (SSD) family with a 160GB drive in a 2.5-inch form factor.
The X25-M product is shipping now, and the 1.8-inch 160GB version will be available next month.
Intel announced the 80GB X25-M and X18-M—t’s first foray into the SSD market—at its Developers Forum in August and shortly after announced the X25-E for enterprise servers and workstations. The 32GB Intel X25-E Extreme SATA is based on Intel’s single-level cell NAND flash memory and is designed to maximize the input and output operations per second, while the X25M is a multi-level cell memory, affording it greater capacity.
Computerworld reviewed the 80GB X25-M in September and found it to be the fastest consumer-grade SSD on the market to date. The X25-M even beat out Western Digital‘s fastest Velociraptor hard disk drive, which has a 250.2MBps. burst speed and 105.6MBps average read speed. The X25-M turned in 256.7MBps and 230.2MBps burst and transfer rates, respectively.
Intel did not immediately offer pricing on the new 160GB X25-M and X18-M drives.