I love Intel’s massive booth on the CES show floor. The meeting rooms extend up to a second floor that can be seen just below the row of funky blue lights.

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The PCPer gang was briefed by ‘top men‘ from Intel on several items, including Solid State Storage.

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I finally got my hands on an Intel 310 SSD. Here are a couple of pics for ya:

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The front, with controller, a pair of flash chips, and RAM (for operation, not cache).

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…and the back. Three more flash parts bring the total to 5. What’s interesting is this is the 80GB part. From the specs, the 300 series 80GB unit should perform on-par with the existing X25-M of the same capacity – a feat we will need to see in-person to believe as the X25-M uses twice (10) the number of channels to achieve those figures. 

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Here is a shot to help demonstrate the miniature size of the 300 series parts. Here we see the new part along side a 2.5″ board. Intel must have read my mind with this adapter, since I was scratching my head wondering how I could benchmark the new drive on our existing testbed. With this adapter (which Intel has promised to provide with review samples), I can thrash this tiny unit with the power of my fully operational storage testbed.

I’ll be checking this out in person, along with some other goodies we can’t yet speak about, in the coming weeks. More to follow!

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