Intel Corp. on Monday unveiled a new lineup of solid-state drives (SSDs) designed for consumers. The new drives are designed to offer leading edge, but not extreme performance and capacities. The new SSDs are Intel's first drives that use Serial ATA-600 interface.

Intel SSD 510-series drives support sustained read speed of 450MB/s and write speed of 300MB/s as well as up to 20K 4KB read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and up to 5K write IOPS. The Intel SSD 510 offers the fastest sequential read and write speeds of any consumer SATA SSD available today, according to Intel.

Previously known as Elmcrest, the Intel SSD 510-series uses proven Intel 34-nanometer NAND flash memory to deliver best-in-class sequential performance of up to 500MB/s sequential read speeds and up to 315 MB/s writes for its high-capacity model. The product is available now and comes in a 250GB capacity priced at $584 and a 120GB at $284, for 1000-unit quantities.

“The Intel SSD 510-series helps round out our SSD product line and was specifically designed for applications that require high sequential media transfers. Whether it is a gamer wanting impeccable visual performance and faster game loading, or a performance-intensive workstation user, the new 6Gb/s SATA SSD from Intel is not only significantly faster than the top 10RPM gaming HDD, it’s also faster than two RAIDed gaming HDDs," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for Intel’s NAND solutions group.

Intel 510-series solid-state drives come with three-year warranty; Intel declares 1.2 million hours meantime between failures. 

Tags: Intel, Elmcrest, SSD