After having announced, almost one month ago, the release of their new line of solid-state hard drives, the X25-M-also known as the Intel Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drive-is scheduled to hit the market this week. The product has a 80GB drive, uses multi-level cell NAND flash technology (that replaces the mechanical rotating magnetic disk one) designed to compute with 10 parallel channels and optimized firmware and will come in two sizes: 2.5 inch and 1.8 inch, in order to fit in both the desktop and the laptop.

Intel tests have shown that SSDs perform nine times faster than hard disks and take less time to boot or resume, also. Larger 160 Gb versions are scheduled for release in early 2009.

The X25-M, which  prides itself in a 250MB/s sustained read rate, will cost $595 in 1,000 unit quantities, rendering it more expensive than any other MLC SSD on the market. Nevertheless, Intel's product has many other advantages on its competition, which include improved wear-leveling efficiency, better power efficiency and higher number of IOPS (Input/Output operations per second). Its read speed is 70MB/s, while its read latency, 85 microsecond.

Intel is expected to release a line of single-level cell (SLC) SSDs for the server, storage and enterprise environments within the next three months.