Intel Corp. on Monday unveiled its new 525-series solid-state drives in mSATA form-factor specifically designed for ultrathin laptops/ultrabooks, all-in-one desktops, media tablets and other low-power devices.  The new SSDs provide leading-edge performance while occupying only one-eighth the space of a traditional 2.5” hard disk drives and solid-state drives.

Intel SSDs 525-series provide sequential read performance up to 550MB/s and sequential write speed of up to 520MB/s. The drives are capable of random read performance of up to 50 000 input/output operations per second (IOPS) and, random write performance of up to 80 000 IOPS, which is higher than typical mainstream mSATA SSDs. The Intel SSD 525series will be available in 30GB, 60GB, 90GB, 120GB, 180GB and 240GB capacities. The company has begun shipping the 120GB and 180GB options, with additional capacities and volume shipments to follow this quarter.

The Intel SSD 525-series utilizes Intel 25nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory and LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller. The drives also feature advanced encryption sandard (AES) 128-bit encryption capabilities for added data protection should a device be stolen or lost. Thd SSDs are backed by a 5-year limited warranty.

The Intel 525-series SSDs with PCI Express mini-connector and Serial ATA-6Gb/s interface measure 3.7mm*50.8mm*29.85mm and weigh around 10 grams.

"The Intel SSD 525-series is Intel's latest 6 Gb/s mSATA product, which brings high performance to an ultra-portable form factor targeted for ultrabooks and a myriad of embedded solutions. With these new performance thresholds available in a small form factor package, and backed by Intel quality and reliability, the Intel SSD 525 opens the door to an unlimited number of creative embedded solutions such as in-flight entertainment, mobile workstations, microservers and IP phone storage," said James Slattery, product line manager for Intel non-volatile memory solutions group client SSDs.

Tags: Intel, SSD, SandForce, LSI, NAND, Flash, mSATA