Intel Corporation is announcing release of a new family of business-class SSDs. The first member(s) of this new product family will be the Pro 1500 Series, which will offer improved manageability and security features when utilized with Intel’s vPro Technology and an Opal management suite of protocols.  The Intel Pro 1500 Series helps IT departments to easily deploy and securely manage their usage, resulting in enhanced performance that increases employee productivity and lowers Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Utilizing Intel’s Stable Image Platform Program makes a transition to the Pro 1500 series predictable and easy, with necessary key drivers already in place. This also creates the ability for IT departments to remotely monitor and diagnose issues at the drive level, requiring less desk-side PC maintenance or repairs. Intel’s SSD Pro 1500 Series utilizes enterprise-grade security features, including hardware-level 256-bit AES encryption and Trusted Computing Group (TCG) Opal key management protocols; which have become an industry standard. The Pro 1500 Series features remote management capabilities, improving your IT department’s efficiency also. Power consumption is reduced from watts to milliwatts, another significant aspect of lowering the total cost of ownership. With more and more mobile computing devices appearing in the workplace, the extended battery life is critical. According to Rob Crooke, Intel corporate vice president and general manager for the Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group, “The modern business employee is increasingly mobile and works in multiple environments. The Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series ensures employees have the flexibility, battery life and performance they need, while IT has the assurance data is secure and the device can be managed remotely. Tight integration with Intel vPro Technology means we are able to deliver a complete solution for corporate business users.” Rick Echevarria, Intel’s vice president of PC Client Group and general manager of the Business Client Platform Division, states that “By improving security, manageability and TCO, the professional Family of Intel SSDs will enable more mobile devices such as vPro Technology-powered PCs to further penetrate the enterprise while delivering faster start-up and improved battery life. We believe the combination of these solid-state drives, vPro Technology and tools such as Intel Setup and Configuration Software will trigger innovation among ISVs and improve enterprise PCs in the near future.” The Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series is offered in both a 2.5″ (7mm) standard form factor, and in the new M.2 (NGFF) form factor. Both versions are offered in capacities of 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 240Gb and 360GB; with the 2.5″ model adding a 480GB capacity. Both form factors will utilize 20nm Intel Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash memory, controlled by a LSI-SandForce SF2281 controller and connected via a SATA 6GB/s interface. Both Pro1500 form factor SSDs are stated to attain sequential read speeds of up to 540 MB/s, and writes of up to 490 MB/s. Random read and write IOPS are stated as 41,000 IOPS and 80,000 IOPS, respectively. Drive life expectancy is stated as 1,200,000 hours Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). Intel’s standard warranty will apply to the Pro 1500 series. Pricing and availability have yet to be announced. Intel offers the Pro 2500 in three formats and has a broad range of capacities. The 2.5-inch form factor has 120, 180, 240, 360 and 480GB storage options. The single-sided version of the M.2 80mm (2280) is 180GB only, whereas the double-sided version is either 240GB or 360GB. The M.2 60mm (2260) double-sided offers 180GB and 240GB capacities. Bear in mind that the M.2 options are SATA based and not PCI-E based. As befitting the market at which they are aimed, the Pro 2500 drives come loaded to gills with data protection. For a start, these are self-encrypting drives (SED) using 256-bit encryption that is hardware based. The drives have support for TCG Opal 2.0 (the Pro 1500 only supported v1.0) and IEEE-1667 for Microsoft’s eDrive, although this is turned off by default. eDrive if you want it, enabled from the Intel SSD Pro Administrator Tool If you want to use IEEE-1667, it can be turned on by using the new Intel SSD Pro Administrator Tool, a command line utility that also allows IT administrators to perform a complete PSID revert, should the drive's encryption key get lost. By using Intel’s vPro and SCS (Intel Setup and Configuration software), IT admins can also remotely manage the drives and they also supports third party management software. LSI Sandforce controller... Opening up the drive (bang goes the warranty) reveals that, as with the Pro 1500, Intel is using an LSI SandForce SF-2281 controller but with its own firmware. The big surprise is that the SF2281 is looking after third-party NAND. Yep, not an Intel chip in sight. Instead there are 20nm MLC NAND chips manufactured by SK Hynix. ...and not an Intel NAND in sight Fear not though, Intel says that the memory has gone through the same vetting procedure as its own products - even so, it’s still a surprising move. In the 240GB drive there are 16(eight per side of the PCB) 16GB (2 8GB dies per package) of these SK Hynix NAND chips. Sequential read/write performance across the range, regardless of format, is quoted as up to 540MB/s reads and 490MB/s writes. My 240GB review sample sailed past both claims when tested with the ATTO benchmark, giving scores of 555MB/s for reads and 533MB/s for writes. ATTO and AS SSD results – click for a larger image As it’s a SandForce controller, it comes as no great surprise to see that it handles data that is compressed better than uncompressed data. This can be seen in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. The default uncompressed benchmark gives a sequential read score of 478.8MB/s and a write score of 288.9MB/s. Switching to the compressed data benchmark the Read score rises to 523MB/s but the best performance jump is in the Write where the MB/s figure jumps to 520.1MB/s. CrystalDiskMark results: uncompressed (left), compressed (right) When it comes to real life testing, a 50GB folder (28,523 files) took a shade over 10 minutes (at 72MB/s) while a 17GB Blu-ray image took just under three minutes (at 101MB/s) and a 4GB image took 36 seconds at 101MB/s. Intel claims the drive has an endurance of 36.5TB, which works out to be around 20GB of host writes a day for the length of its five-year warranty. The Reg VerdictThe Intel SSD Pro 2500 leads on from the previous Pro 1500 model offering better, more secure hardware encryption and introduces the Intel SSD Pro Administrator Tool which allows better disk management for IT bods, which is all good. Yet on the other hand, it uses a controller that is very long in the tooth and it doesn’t have any form of power loss protection, which these days can be found in consumer SSDs, never mind one designed for the business environment. Close, but no cigar. ® Business SSD that ticks a lot of boxes for administration and security but misses one useful trick. How fast is Intel SSD Pro 1500 Series 180gb?Summary. Why is Intel SSD so expensive?Intel ssds are mainly in the datacenter which values reliability and performance so a lot of the intel ones are much more reliable than other brands i still have a 240gb intel sata 2 ssd which ive written 20tb to and it still works like new. |
