Intel finally delivers a SATA solid-state drive
Intel finally announced its own SATA solid-state drive for notebook and desktop clients, and our secured lab has become a feeding frenzy of folks geeking out on the X25-M, just one of the SSD drives Intel introduced Tuesday at its Developer Forum in San Francisco.
The mainstream SSDs will come in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch models and both will use standard multilevel cell NAND flash memory that will hopefully translate to a lower cost-per-bit for the consumer.
As of the time of this announcement, Intel hasn't released pricing. We're crossing our fingers that the company will eventually price these drives within a reasonable range for the average consumer; most current 64GB SSDs fall around $800.
Along with the 80GB drive, Intel also sent over its own system benchmarks that show a 50 percent improvement in system performance as well as a 9x improvement in HDD performance. We'll obviously put these numbers to the test and report our own benchmark results along with a full review in early September.
Justin Yu covers desktop computers, printers, and peripherals for CNET. When he's not scouring eBay for useless ephemera or eating hot dogs for breakfast, he spends his time making fun of Internet culture every morning on The 404 podcast. E-mail Justin. 
