Intel SSD 520 240GB

INTRODUCTION

Intel is one of the few companies that often leads the tech world in innovation and movement. This is especially true in in the microprocessor market, where the chipmaker has retained steady dominance ever since Conroe appeared on the market since 2006. While Intel may not always succeed in every single round (remember the Pentium 4?), the company often recovers quickly and regains its lead over the competitors. Big companies like Intel have both the resource and talent to keep their dominance.

Intel's innovative nature led them to create the "tick-tock" plan for their CPU's. They probably also have a similar plan for their SSD as they did with the CPU in which they start with a new controller first (tick) then fine-tune it and pair it with a die shrink of NAND (tock) for additional performance and storage capacity. We have seen this with the X25-M, which introduced the Intel SSD controller and utilized 50nm MLC NAND. The following year, Intel released the the X25-M G2, which utilizes 34nm MLC NAND and brings the capacity up to 160GB. Unfortunately for Intel, the SSD is a relative new area of technology where innovation advances are happening at alarming pace. Intel had originally planned to release the successor to the second generation X25-M in 2010 but the company could not produce a controller that was fast enough to compete against the Crucial C300 and the current market leader, the SandForce controller.

While Intel dominated the CPU market, it was not able to retain its market leader position in the SSD. The X25-M released in 2008 was a huge success, beating almost all its competitors in almost every benchmark; it was the best SSD available at the time. Unfortunately for Intel, its dominance was short lived as competitors such as SandForce- and Marvell-based drives quickly caught up with the industry leader. SandForce and Marvell have since designed controllers that are not only able to match Intel’s performance but also exceed it by a large margin.

Intel probably did not anticipate competitors such as Marvell and SandForce catching up with its own controller this fast. Not able to produce a controller capable of competing in today’s market, and unwilling to let the competitors to have all of the glory and most likely the market-share, Intel had to do something to stay in the SSD business.

Intel has made a move rare for the chip giant: it recently started making SSD's based on third-party controllers. Intel did this first with the SSD 510 which used a Marvell 9174 6Gbps controller. Marvell was the fastest and the only SATA III controller back in 2010. However, the SATA III-compatible SandForce 2000 series controllers have since taken the performance crown. In the industry where having the title of “fastest” is the key, Intel has decided to launch the successor to the 510 with a SandForce controller.

Intel's vision with their SSD lineup is wide penetration into different markets. From the slides above, we can see that Intel wants not only sell the SSD to enthusiasts but also to business clients, datacenter, servers, and corporate ITs. Intel also wants to bring the SSD to the mainstream markets and OEM.