Intel today unveiled what it called its most reliable solid-state drive
(SSD) series to date; the drives are aimed at enterprise client users
and small businesses.
The new
Intel SSD Pro 2500
drives are Intel's first "Pro" series SSDs to be sold through
third-party channels. The previous model, the Pro 1500, was sold
exclusively by Intel to equipment makers.
The new drives come in a 7mm high, 2.5 in. form factor and 80mm and 60mm M.2 form-factor cards.
The 2.5-in Pro 2500 SSD comes in 120GB ($95), 180GB ($130), 240GB
($160), 360GB (no pricing available) and 480GB ($305) capacities. The
M.2 800mm card comes in 180GB, 240GB and 360GB capacities, and the M.2
60mm card comes in 180GB and 240GB models. The prices remain the same
for the M.2 models.
The 2.5-in SSD uses a SATA 6Gbps interface, while the M.2 cards use a
PCIe 4.0 interface. The drives have peak random performance of 48,000
reads and 80,000 writes input/output per second (IOPS). The drives have a
top sequential read performance of 540MB/s and a top write performance
of 490MB/s.
"Our performance, quite honestly, is not industry leading, but this
drive is not about performance," said James Slattery, an Intel SSD
product marketing manager.
The Pro 2500 series is all about reliability, power efficiency and
security, which make them standouts from previous products, Slattery
said.
But at a time when
Samsung and other vendors are offering 10-year warranties for their flash drives, Intel has stuck with a five-year warranty for the Pro 2500 series.
The drives use a hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption algorithm.
Intel also upgraded from the Opal 1.0 encryption standard on its
previous Pro 1500 series SSDs to Opal 2.0 on the Pro 2500 drives. Opal
2.0 is a standard for managing self-encrypting drives.
The Pro 2500 SSDs are also compatible with Microsoft's eDrive
standard for Windows 8, which accelerates cryptographic processing (i.e.
speeds up the encryption algorithm so performance doesn't suffer).
The new drives come with
Intel's SSD Pro Administrator toolset,
which allows remote configuration of the drives as well as monitoring
of hardware health. The Pro Administrator tool was also available on the
Pro 1500 series SSDs.
Intel said it put the Pro 2500 series drives though a more stringent
validation cycle that included testing on about 120 client systems using
5,000 unique setups.
The Intel SSD Pro 2500 Series also features five power modes to
enable longer battery life and better mobile use. The power modes
include active (using 195 milliwatts (mW) of power), Idle (using 55mW)
and sleep mode (using just 5mW of power).
