Intel has announced a new range of 710 series solid-state drives, and has targeted them as a replacement to hard drives in enterprise servers.
The 100-300 GB capacity drives replace the previous X25-E SSDs, which were also targeted at enterprises. However they have 30 times more endurance which has been one of the factors that has slowed the replacement of harddrives with SSDs.
That and price. These drives have prices starting at$649 for the 100GB version to $1,929 for the 300GB drive.
The drives are multilevel cell SSDs, which store bits of data at multiple levels in each cell. Intel insists that they also provide the endurance of typical single-level cell SSDs, where a bit of data is stored per cell. SLCs are considered faster and more reliable than MLCs.
The Intel SSD 710 includes a technology called High Endurance technology, which combines firmware enhancements, management features and algorithms to reduce data errors.