Intel Solid-State Drive 520 Series Released – Intel Goes Sandforce

Intel launched the companies fastest, most robust client/consumer solid-state drive (SSD) to date this morning with the release of the Intel Solid-State Drive 520 Series (Intel SSD 520), a 6 gigabit-per-second (gbps) SATA III SSD produced using Intel 25-nanometer (nm) NAND memory.

The Intel SSD 520 delivers up to 80,000 maximum 4K random write Input-Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and up to 50,000 4K random read IOPS to speed through every day operations. High sequential read performance of up to 550 megabytes-per-second (MB/s) and up to 520MB/s sequential writes also markedly accelerate and improve user productivity. With performance numbers like these you can see that this drive is aimed at PC enthusiasts, gamers, professionals or small-medium businesses (SMBs). The Intel SSD 520 Series is priced as follows, based on 1,000-unit quantities: 60GB for $149, 120GB at $229, 180GB at $369, 240GB at $509 and 480GB at $999. It comes with a 5-year limited warranty. You can read our review on the 240GB Intel SSD 520 here.