If you are a fan of The SSD Review, you will remember our prediction of the inevitable Intel/SandForce partnership which goes back several months now.

Our first article was in March of this year where we were bombarded with e-mails and returns by those who were upset at such speculation. The second article followed in April after yet another Intel road map was leaked but carried some great details!

If you look at the 520 ‘Cherryville’ information on the below road map you will see the SSD sizes match that of only ‘SandForce Driven’ SSDs which brought forth our first clue that Intel and SandForce had finally come together in the SSD arena.

Today we can go one further and actually provide Intel specifications for you thanks to BouweenPC via T-Gathering. Click on the picture for high resolution shots!

If you look close, you will see the performance listed at 550MB/s read with 520MB/s write and 70,000IOPS at random 4k aligned write disk access. Intel has really gone to town with capacities adding on 60 and 180GB capacities to their originally planned 120, 240 and 480GB capacities reflected in the road map. Originally scheduled for release in November 2011, the drive has a great five year warranty and…what? No ‘SandForce Driven’ acknowledgement? Come on Intel!!!

It seems the only question left is whether it’s going to be a Christmas of New Years release!!! Congrats Intel!!!

UPDATE:

It seems that BouweenPC has even gotten a hold of the Product Brief which we have posted on the following page! Here is another by Softpedia that speaks to delay in release.