Intel Announces SSD 730 Series For Gamers and Power Users

Intel today unveiled the Intel Solid-State Drive 730 Series, a powerful performance SSD perfect for gamers and workstation users alike. This drive is unique in the sense that is has been factory overclocked to provide more performance. Intel overclocked the controller by 50% and the NAND by 20% resulting in 50s read latencies, consistently high transfer rates of up to 550 MB/s sequential reads, and up to 89,000 IOPS random reads. Intel is hoping that gamers and enthusiasts will use two Intel SSD 730 Series drives in RAID 0 along with Intel Rapid Storage Technology to achieve throughput of over 1GB/s. Intel claims that the reliability of this new drive series is top notch due to high-quality NAND and a third-generation Intel controller are being used that were originally designed for the data center. The drive uses basically the same platform as Intel’s SSD DC S3700 and S3500 except now that it is factory tuned for extreme performance. You can’t manually adjust the clock settings and the factory ‘overclock’ is locked down. The drive will be available in 240GB and 480GB capacities, is protected by a 5-year warranty and available today for pre-order ahead of its official March 18th, 2014 release date.