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When we first heard Intel was diving into the solid-state drive business, we were pretty surprised. In retrospect, though, we probably should have seen it coming—the writing was on the wall. Intel’s joint venture with Micron gave them tremendous NAND flash memory capacity. The company had also introduced tiny SSDs for handheld devices. Packaging NAND chips into larger format drives is just a logical step.

Intel is currently shipping 80GB MLC (multi-level cell) drives into the market, at $595 in quantities of 1,000. The 2.5-inch form factor is known as the Intel X25-M, while the 1.8-inch drives are the X18-M. End-user prices will probably be well north of $600. MLC NAND flash holds two bits of data per cell, and has traditionally been slower than SLC (single level cell) flash. Intel is also shipping 32GB SLC drives into the high-end server market, but those drives weren’t available for testing.

What MLC NAND flash brings to the table is capacity. Intel’s 80GB drives and their upcoming 160GB drives are MLC, but Intel is making aggressive performance claims for them.

Why is Intel interested in the SSD business? The primary reason is the upcoming release of Nehalem, their next generation CPU. During qualification testing for Nehalem, Intel discovered that hard drive performance became an even bigger bottleneck than in the past. Nehalem’s raw CPU horsepower and its extremely robust memory make the drive bottleneck seem more glaring.

The other issue is power. SSDs use much less power and generate much less heat than their rotating counterparts. This is a major issue in huge server farms, which are becoming more widespread as more video content is served up over the internet. Intel suggests that the power savings—both for running the drives and the lower HVAC requirements—make SSDs more cost effective in many large scale server environments.

Today, we take a look at the performance of a pair of Intel X25-M 80GB SSD drives, in both single drive and RAID 0 modes. Will Intel’s foray into the storage market bring new performance levels to an emerging product mix? Let’s find out. Continued…