Intel announces Series 730 SSDs, targetted at gamers and content creators

Intel announced the Series 730 Series yesterday, which will have SSDs targetted specifically at gamers and content creators. It will launch on March 18 in two capacities - 240GB priced at $270 (approx Rs 16,800) and 480GB priced at $500 (approx Rs 31,100). Intel uses an eight-channel SSD controller (Intel PC29AS21CA0), 20nm IMFT NAND chips and 1GB of DDR3-1600 cache. The Series 730 SSDs will have the controller overclocked by 50 per cent taking the speed from 400MHz to 600MHz. In order to reduce the read latencies, Intel has also overclocked the NAND by 20 per cent. With the 240GB version of the series 730 SSD, you get sequential read speeds of 550MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 270MB/s. Random 4K read/writes are in the vicinity of 86,000/56,000 IOPs respectively. You can perform up to 50GB writes/day on this drive. The 480GB Intel Series 730 drive gives sequential read speed of 550MB/s and a sequential write speed of 470MB/s. Random 4K read and writes are expected to give 89,000 and 74,000 IOPs respectively. Endurance on this drive is up to 71GB of writes per day. Although the sequential speeds are competitive with most consumer class drives, it is the endurance of these drives and Intel's promise of a 5-year warranty that sounds interesting. The higher 4K read/write IOPS should also help with resource-heavy tasks such as gaming and working on content creation applications.