Intel touts superfast SSD 510 series

Intel has released a range of solid state drives (SSDs) which the company says will double read speeds and triple write speeds compared to previous models.

The SSD 510 series can reach read speeds of 500MB/s and write speeds of 315MB/s, according to Intel.

The 510 series is designed for use with the improved SATA interface on Intel's new Core platform, and supports SATA speeds of 6Gbit/s, double that of Intel's previous SSD line.

Intel said that the SSDs perform up to 50 per cent faster than 10,000rpm platter-based hard drives.

SSDs have yet to penetrate the enterprise or consumer PC spaces in a major way, but have become increasingly popular for high-end systems.

SSDs are more expensive to produce, but generally offer faster performance and better energy efficiency than traditional platter-based drives.

Intel said that the 510 series targets traditional high-performance SSD markets such as media-creation systems, compute-intensive workstations and high-end gaming PCs.

"The Intel SSD 510 Series helps round out our SSD product line and was specifically designed for applications that require high sequential media transfers," said Pete Hazen, NAND solutions director of marketing at Intel.

"Whether it's a gamer wanting impeccable visual performance and faster game loading or a performance-intensive workstation user, the new 6Gbit/s SATA SSD from Intel is not only significantly faster than the top 10,000rpm gaming hard drive, it's also faster than two RAID-ed gaming hard drives."

The SSD 510 series comes in a 250GB version for $584 (£360) and a 120GB version for $284 (£175), both in quantities of 1,000.