Digital Home Thoughts: Intel Transitions to 34nm Process on SSDs, Drops Prices

"Intel Corporation is moving to a more advanced, 34- nanometer (nm) manufacturing process for its leading NAND flash-based Solid State Drive (SSD) products, which are an alternative to a computer's hard drive. The move to 34nm will help lower prices of the SSDs up to 60 percent for PC and laptop makers and consumers who buy them due to the reduced die size and advanced engineering design."

Good news all around - Intel, who makes some of the top-performing soild-state drives on the market today, is moving to a smaller manufacturing process. This has the effect of increasing yields, and thus prices drop. Capacities are still the same at 80 GB and 160 GB - I really thought we'd see a bump to 240 GB by now - but these new drives will have a 25 reduction in latency; an amazing 65 microseconds versus the 4000 microseconds on a typical hard drive. Better yet, write performance has increased twofold - and the last-gen drives had a blistering 250 MB/s read speed, so these should push 500 MB/s for read speeds. That's mind-blowing performance!

The price drop Intel quotes of 60% is a little far-fetched though - the price on NewEgg for the 160 GB X-25M is $629 USD, and Intel is quoting the price in a 1000-unit lot as $440 USD; that's a difference of 30%, so while it's a nice price drop, it's not quite as good as Intel is quoting.