Intel has now officially unveiled its newest 730 series solid state drivers aimed at gamers and workstations. Intel designed the 730 SSD series in order to take on some of the competitors high-end offers including Samsung's 840 and achieved it with a bit of overclocking on the both controller and the NAND. The new Intel 730 SSD series is Intel's way of bringing the enterprise-class a bit more closer to consumers.

Based on Intel's 8-channel controller design seen on the S3500/S3700 enterprise-class SSDs as well as 20nm NAND, the Intel 730 SSD series offers some quite impressive performance punch. Both the controller and the 20nm NAND have been overclocked by 50 and 20 percent. The controller was pushed from 400MHz to 600MHz while NAND flash was pushed from standard 83MHz up to 100MHz.

To be available in 240 and 480GB capacities, the new Intel 730 series SDDs will offer maximum sequential performance of up to 550MB/s for read and up to 470MB/s for write while maximum random performance is at up to 89K and 75K IOPS for read and write. Most important thing is probably the endurance, which rose up to 91TB on the 240GB model and up to 128TB on 480GB one. This is an impressive improvement from the 36.5TB we have seen on Intel's 530 SSD series.

The new Intel 730 SSD series is already available for pre-order from various retailers and shipping is expected to start on March 13th. The price for the 240GB model is set at US $249 while the 480GB one goes for US $489.





Source: Intel.com.