Intel 320 Series 300GB SSD

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The folks at PC Perspective and Legit Reviews have both posted reviews of Intel's new 320 Series 300GB SSD. Here's a quote from the Legit Reviews article:

As a follow-up to their very successful X25-M series of drives, Intel has launched their 320 Series drives which feature a host of new features while being driven by their own proprietary controller. With the SATA 3Gbps SSD market being so crowded, can Intel tempt consumers to look their way? See the outcome of the testing and judge for yourself.
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Today, Intel has announced the release of the new Intel® Solid-State Drive 320 series. The new 320 series is the follow on to the Intel Solid-State Drive X25-M main stream drives. You can read information on these drives at http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/320series/overview.htm. These are great SATA 2 drives and will have a very attractive price point.
With the release of the Intel Enthusiast Solid State Drive 510 SATA 3 (6Gbit) last month Intel has a complex range of products to fit your SSD needs.
 
looks nice, if you don't need or want sata 3 then this is a nice solution.

40GB @ $89 ($2.25 / GB)
80GB @ $159 ($1.99 / GB)
120GB @ $209 ($1.74 / GB)
160GB @ $289 ($1.81 / GB)
300GB @ $529 ($1.76 / GB)
600GB @ $1,069 ($1.78 / GB)
 
The only way the 320 series will be sucessfull is if Intel prices them way less per GB then the SF 2k series & the new marvell drives..

That said the prices ATlist's are looking pretty attractive, not enough to make this the must have drive for everyone still on a mechanical HDD, but still pretty nice.
 
price i think are rather high for what is coming out. I guess there will prob be a price drop when vertex3 comes out. This ssd is for mainstream not top performance and I think to go mainstream price needs to get around 150 for 80gb-120gb. For reliability I would choose Intel anyday after having issues with Vertex 1 and hearing about the Vertex 2 issues.
 
hackztor said:
price i think are rather high for what is coming out. I guess there will prob be a price drop when vertex3 comes out. This ssd is for mainstream not top performance and I think to go mainstream price needs to get around 150 for 80gb-120gb. For reliability I would choose Intel anyday after having issues with Vertex 1 and hearing about the Vertex 2 issues.
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The listed prices for the intel 320's are way lower per GB then anything else currently out 3rd generation & lower then most 2nd gen street prices. & Of course those prices will drop some more.. I am hoping that due to the somewhat lackluster performance intel prices them to sell (like AMD does with there CPU's) and we see them approaching $1/GB
 
I am hoping that due to the somewhat lackluster performance intel prices them to sell (like AMD does with there CPU's) and we see them approaching $1/GB
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I do not think this is even remotely possible since this price will be lower than the price of the NAND chips themselves.
 
IntelEnthusiast said:
Today, Intel has announced the release of the new Intel® Solid-State Drive 320 series. The new 320 series is the follow on to the Intel Solid-State Drive X25-M main stream drives. You can read information on these drives at http://www.intel.com/design/flash/nand/320series/overview.htm. These are great SATA 2 drives and will have a very attractive price point.
With the release of the Intel Enthusiast Solid State Drive 510 SATA 3 (6Gbit) last month Intel has a complex range of products to fit your SSD needs.
Click to expand...

Helpful mention of this being a paper or hard launch would be helpful.

...complex range of products...
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who over there writes these things?
 
drescherjm said:
I do not think this is even remotely possible since this price will be lower than the price of the NAND chips themselves.
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& If the nand chips aren't selling then they will lower in price too..

Bottom line is that for the Vast majority of the PC market 1.86 per GB is too much still (& I am not talking about the enthusiast market like most of us belong to)
 
Feels like a bit of a stop-gap. A "320 G2" with SATA3 within 9mo? Maybe not with the 510, but this one does saturate the bus on reads, right?
 
Looks like a minor iteration, anyone have any dirt on when we get a new blockbuster?
 
AthlonXP said:
looks nice, if you don't need or want sata 3 then this is a nice solution.

40GB @ $89 ($2.25 / GB)
80GB @ $159 ($1.99 / GB)
120GB @ $209 ($1.74 / GB)
160GB @ $289 ($1.81 / GB)
300GB @ $529 ($1.76 / GB)
600GB @ $1,069 ($1.78 / GB)
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These seem like reasonable prices for an intel product. Anand's conclusion was that these are not suited for OSes though, so that is a bit of kick in the chips.
 
Megalomaniac said:
These seem like reasonable prices for an intel product. Anand's conclusion was that these are not suited for OSes though, so that is a bit of kick in the chips.
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Where does he say that?? The only thing I saw was that he recommended an OS that is TRIM capable.
 
Seems like this drive could be popular with laptop OEM's.

I'd like to see these go under $1.50/GB, then I think we'd start seeing an acceleration in the shift toward SSD's.
 
Peteman100 said:
Where does he say that?? The only thing I saw was that he recommended an OS that is TRIM capable.
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Yeah, I didn't see a direct quote saying that either. The only thing he alluded to is that on the 4K random writes, QD=3 is similar to what an OS drive would see. There, the G3's performance was near the bottom.

I guess if you benchmark your SSD a lot, this drive isn't that great. It's relatively slow compared to all the Vertex 3 and C400.

I think it'll still find a market from being more "reliable" since they added the built in RAID-4 to help preserve data integrity in case of NAND failure. The AES sounds great but I don't think that many people will actually set a password on it.

It's kind of risky to go for the low-end with worse performance and hopefully lower pricing. But if it sells in the 1.7$/GB range, that's cheaper than the current C300 drives so at least there's that. Problem is the the performance is similar to all the last gen drives.

[LYL]Homer;1037039155 said:
Seems like this drive could be popular with laptop OEM's.

I'd like to see these go under $1.50/GB, then I think we'd start seeing an acceleration in the shift toward SSD's.
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This is a good point. OEMs care about price and price only so they may gain some traction here. No way I can see them putting a Vertex 3 in there.
 
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I paid $1.77 per GB for my C400 256GB. These G3's aren't cheap enough yet.
 
Seems like Intel doesn't care about being competitive.. The G3 doesn't offer much, but I still want one...
 
i was going to say, looking at the specs, doesnt seem to impressive, or did i miss something?
 
MrGuvernment said:
i was going to say, looking at the specs, doesnt seem to impressive, or did i miss something?
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It doesn't, but does Intel care? I doubt it. Intel will wait until they are far behind and then will release a top product.
 
These suckers would sell like hot cakes if Intel would drop the prices another 20%. The performance is fine for those of us who aren't obsessed with benchmark scores.
 
The Intel G2 X25m was selling on release for $500 a year and a half ago, lately you could get it around $400 (around $315 with MIR but this is more to clear old inventory), the new Intel 320 160gb is $313, so its no that bad, its almost $200 from a year an half, and $100 what was a couple of months ago, probably in 3 to 4 months will go below $300.

Now this are not hi end ssd, more like mainstream, kinda like what intel does with their cpu i 3/5/7, the 320 is filling up the low end, like core i3. The i5 are more like mid end as the Intel 510 series, there is still the X25E replacement on the horizon aka i7 of the ssd, suppose to be the 700 series, some people are saying it will be SF controller, but no one knows for sure.

I think overall intel did a good job with the pricing, it doped around 40% from when it was released, with slightly better writes. Now the smaller size could been priced a little lower, 160/300 seem decent.
 
Intel's pricing against itself all makes sense, but when you take into account the competition the G3 doesn't make sense at its current cost per GB. The surprising thing is it looks like Intel will be getting both their drives to market before Crucial and OCZ. I guess you can say the C400/M4 is out, but it seems to only be limited to SuperBiiz for some reason.
 
Finally. Been waiting for over a year. Finally time to put those discounts to good use. :)
 
Any news on how the lower capacity 320s perform? So far all the reviews I've seen pit the 160GB G2 vs the 300GB 320... I know they've only just been released, but that's still quite a difference in capacity and price.

Personally I was looking at getting a 120GB unit, just not sure if I should jump on a G2 or wait for a 320.
 
Why in the world is this thing still using SATA2?

I think the real question is, where are all the SATA3 drives that were promised for mid march.
 
ShatteredX said:
These suckers would sell like hot cakes if Intel would drop the prices another 20%. The performance is fine for those of us who aren't obsessed with benchmark scores.
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I imagine they'll sell pretty well anyway - the Intel name/reputation for reliability will compensate for the speed difference (especially considering how ridiculously fast all SSDs are compared to mechanical drives).
 
It will be worth for the integrated encryption to add to my trusty X200s laptop with its measly SU2300 processor without completely killing performance and battery life. Anyone knowing if the AES implementation uses XTS or the older "unsafe" ECB/CBC algorithms?

I orininally thought this drive would be great as an ZFS ZIL/SLOG device because of the backup capacitors. Then I read that the 40GB version will have something like 40MB/s sequential write (and 90MB/s for the 80GB version), which makes them unfeasible for that purpose.
 
How come no1 ask the 2 serious questions:

1) http://en.expreview.com/2011/03/23/world-exclusive-review-intel-g3-ssd-80gb/15569.html

Intel 320 series 80GB SSD pack 25nm MLC NAND memory chips and feature performance improvement,however,the number of write cycles per cell is decreased from 5,000 in 34nm NAND to 3,000 in 25nm.
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If the 3K write cycle is over, what then? Is this the reason that the X25M is selling $100 more than the new 320 series of the same 160GB capacity?

2) In neither of the review on page 1, in particular, ANAND tech article, they fail to mention that famous data retention problem, what's the soluton to that:

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1492711&highlight=electron

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On an unrelated matter, is there any1 know what is the write cycles per cell for those 6GB/s Intel SSD drive?
 
Is this the reason that the X25M is selling $100 more than the new 320 series of the same 160GB capacity?
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The G1's never dropped in price when the G2s came out.

I don't believe Intel has blow out sales....just the retailers.
 
MrGuvernment said:
i was going to say, looking at the specs, doesnt seem to impressive, or did i miss something?
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Maybe you missed the reliability stats that where published by that big French retailer? I'll take a drive with 4x lower failure rate over one with higher bench marks any day.

That said, it's pretty disappointing that they could not get anything faster out.
 
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