Introduction

The company Intel does not need much of an introduction. It has been a market and technology leader in CPU technology forever. One of their less well-known areas of expertise is the production of flash memory chips, so it comes as no surprise that Intel went into the solid-state storage business several years ago.

For their latest generation of solid state drives, Intel switched to using flash controllers made by SandForce. Older Intel drives used the company's own controller that is no longer available on the market. The SSD 330 series is Intel's newest line of mainstream consumer SSDs. Its predecessors include the SSD 320 series and the X25-M series. It is Intel's first SATA 6 Gb/s mainstream SSD product.

The 180 GB version of the Intel 330 Series SSD is interesting because it provides more capacity than 120 GB drives and is not as expensive as the larger 240 GB drives. Pricing of the Intel 330 is very competitive with one of the lowest costs per gigabyte.