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Details of Intel’s SSD plans for 2010

Intel has certainly had a good 2009 with the sales of its X-25 range of SSDs and with good reason. After early SSDs suffered from real teething problems (JMicron controllers anyone?), Intel came from nowhere with some rock solid products and restored confidence in the technology.

Since then, SSDs from the competition have pretty much caught up with Intel and in some areas have even starting to pull out in front. All eyes are certainly on Intel–if anyone has the ability and influence to drive down the prices while increasing capacity and performance of SSDs, its Intel.

With that said Tech Report recently sat down with Intel at CES to shed some light on their SSD plans for 2010.

…We can apparently expect higher capacities than are available with Intel's existing X25-series SSDs. Support for the 6Gbps Serial ATA standard isn't on the menu until 2011, though…Without a faster host interface, new Intel SSDs won't be pushing more than 300MB/s. Intel did, however, say that it was concentrating on improving sequential write speeds to saturate the existing 3Gbps pipe. Sequential write performance has been a relative weak point for the last two generations of X25-M drives.