"Last year Intel had entered the disk storage industry
with the introduction of a few ultra-fast (and ultra expensive)
solid-state drives. Making up Intel's SSD offerings are presently
the X18-M, X25-E, X25-M, Z-P140, and Z-P230. The Z-P140/Z-P230 are
lower-priced PATA-based solid-state drives while the X18/25 series
are their high-performance SATA devices. While still expensive, the
X18-M and X25-M are designed to be Intel's mainstream SATA SSDs.
The X18-M has a 1.8" form factor while the X25-M is the more common
2.5" size. The Intel X25-M is available in an 80GB capacity with a
price tag just under $360 USD while the 160GB model will set you
back nearly $750 USD. However, Intel's current flagship model is
the X25-E Extreme. With the premium on this new technology, the
32GB Intel X25-E Extreme model will currently set you back over
$400 USD. There is also a 64GB version of the X25-E Extreme.
"The Intel X25-E Extreme SSD that we happen to have our hands on
courtesy of System76 is designed for servers, mass storage, and
workstations. The X25-E is an SLC SSD and has 10 parallel NAND
flash channels, a read latency of 75 microseconds, designed for
Serial ATA 2.0 (3.0Gb/s) with NCQ usage, and 2.5" by 7mm form
factor. Intel rates the X25-E to have a life expectancy of 2
million hours MTBF. The operating shock that this drive should be
able to sustain is 1,000G and its operating range is between
0°C and 70°C. With solid-state drives also come lower power
consumption, and the Intel X25-E is rated for 2.4 Watts under a
typical server load and 0.06 Watts while idling. The Intel X25-E
32GB SSD is rated to sustain sequential reads up to 250MB/s and
sequential writes up to 170MB/s."