Intel Launches New 34nm SSDs at a lower price! + Confusing naming

Everyone knows that Intel shocked the tech market when it released it’s x25-m SSD which outperformed by an incredible margin all current SSDs on the market. Since then, other manufactuers have released SSDs that closed the performance gap, but most people and reviewers agreed that the Intel SSD was still the better drive.

Intel is now launching new 34nm (nanometer) SSDs as a new product, apparently even though this is a completely new product on a new manufacturing process, intel is keeping the model number the same: X25-M. (Editor’s Note: Way to go intel, you provide thousands of confusing model names for your CPUs, yet can’t pony up a new name for a completely new product….)

Despite the confusing naming that will most likely create confusion for consumers wanting to buy the new product, and will cause thousands to get screwed on ebay; The new product looks promising! It offers better write performance, some say it ‘doubles the write speed’ (I’ll wait for the benchmarks on that one..)

The new SSDs even comes in at a lower price. (Smaller nanonmeter processes usually provide more units per production run and make things cheaper.) Therefore the new 80GB x25-M is geared to come in at $220 which is very reasonable! especially since most likely it is the quickest thing on the market!

There is still no word of larger capacity drives from intel (wouldn’t a 320GB X25-M be awesome!) but these puppies are expected to be available starting today.

UPDATE: Riot! Riot! It appears that INTEL has announced TRIM support for the newer 34nm drives, yet states that the older x25-M versions won’t be given the TRIM goodness! It appears that there isn’t any real reason they can’t give the older x25-m SSD drives TRIM support other than they just don’t feel like it. They feel like you should buy one of the new ones…. Grrrr… Rabble Rabble.

P.S. Voice your opinion in the forums. 😀