Intel launches 320 Series SSD lineup

Intel 320 Series

Intel has launched its 320 Series of solid state drives (SSD), offering up to 600GB of storage capacity.

The chip maker's new arrival boasts decent capacity and speed improvements over the X25-M SATA SSD, which the 320 Series has replaced.

On the highest-capacity drives, the 320 Series products can produce up to 39,500 input/output operations per second (IOPS) random reads, as well as and 23,000 IOPS random writes.

The "third-generation" SSDs are built on 25-nanometer (nm) NAND flash memory and come in 40, 80, 120, 160, 300 and 600GB models.

The drives come with improved data security features and power-loss management for businesses to take advantage of.

"Whether it's a consumer or corporate IT looking to upgrade from a hard disk drive, or an enterprise seeking to deploy SSDs in their data centers, the new Intel SSD 320 Series will continue to build on our reputation of high quality and dependability over the life of the SSD," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for the Intel Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) Solutions Group.

As for added SSD security, Intel said it has made creative use of spare space on the drives, to ensure added redundancies provide a backup for users.

Furthermore, 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard capabilities come with each drive to prevent data from being accessed if the SSD is stolen or goes missing.

"We see the Intel SSD 320 as a solid advancement to our SSD roadmap, and will continue to upgrade and refresh our SSD product line as we add more enterprise options for our business customers throughout the year," added Tom Rampone, vice president and general manager for the Intel NVM Solutions Group.

Intel made another big play in the SSD market earlier this year, when it announced the 310 series - a range of "ultra-small" products.

The SSDs are just 5mm thick and measures only 51mm x 30mm.

Tom Brewster

Tom Brewster is currently an associate editor at Forbes and an award-winning journalist who covers cyber security, surveillance, and privacy. Starting his career at ITPro as a staff writer and working up to a senior staff writer role, Tom has been covering the tech industry for more than ten years and is considered one of the leading journalists in his specialism.

He is a proud alum of the University of Sheffield where he secured an undergraduate degree in English Literature before undertaking a certification from General Assembly in web development.