Intel's 330 Series SSD offers 180 GB of storage capacity, which has the potential to turn into the new sweet spot segment. Nowadays, drives with 120 GB end up being too small for many users, but 240 GB is still too expensive. Also, many users don't need 240 GB of capacity for their Windows installation and applications, especially if they have a large HDD for storage of media files and downloads.
Like all recent SSDs, the Intel 330 offers huge performance improvements over traditional harddisks. In order to achieve the "odd" capacity of 180 GB, Intel was forced to use twelve flash chips instead of sixteen like on most other SSDs. This results in fewer flash channels being available to the controller, which reduces data throughput. Overall, we see the drive being about 10% slower than the top-end SSDs in our test group. This difference, while significant, is not huge, and the extra capacity might well make up for its reduced performance.
Being based on the Sandforce SF-2281 controller, the drive also delivers proven performance, especially our enterprise MySQL test with a low number of threads shows great results, which could make this drive a good choice for a database server that is not heavily loaded while still requiring more performance than HDDs can offer.
Price-wise, the drive comes at an excellent $140, which translates into a cost of $0.78 per GB - amongst the lowest currently available.