Intel 710 Series 200 GB

Intel SSD 710 Series Solid State Drive Review

Intel's X25-M (mainstream) and X25-E (enterprise) solid state drives proved to be very popular in their respective target markets. As our testing showed back in the day, these drives offer excellent performance, and as time in the field would tell, they were quite reliable as well. On the desktop / mainstream front, Intel has since launched a number of popular new solid state drives based on a few different controller designs, including those from SandForce, Marvell, and Intel themselves. Things are much slower moving on the enterprise front, however, where stability and reliability are paramount. The X25-E remained Intel's flagship enterprise-class SSD for a couple of years, which is an eternity in technology-time. A few months back though, Intel launched a new enterprise-class SSD that was designed to offer the reliability and performance of the X25-E, but at higher capacities and a lower cost per GB. That solid state drive is the Intel SSD 710, of which we'll be showing you here today. There are a number of differences between the Intel X25-E and SSD 710 series which we'll cover a bit later, but the biggest change is the move from SLC NAND to compute-quality (to use a term coined by Intel) MLC NAND flash.