"Intel's new X25-E Extreme SSD reads at 250MB/s, writes at 170MB/s, has near-instantaneous seek times, and may very well be the fastest drive you can plug into a standard Serial ATA port. Read on to see it blow away mechanical hard drives, other SSDs, and even our own expectations.

Solid-state drives use either single-level or multi-level cell flash memory. The former stores one bit per memory cell (a value of 0 or 1) while the latter is capable of storing two bits per cell (with possible values of 00, 01, 10, and 11). Obviously, MLC flash has a significant advantage on the storage density front. However, that advantage comes at the cost of write speeds, which are typically much slower than reads. Intel's MLC-based X25-M, for example, is capable of reading at up to 250MB/s, but its sustained write speed tops out at only 70MB/s. Single-level cell memory doesn't suffer such a great disparity between read and write speeds, as evidenced by the X25-E Extreme, which reads at up to 250MB/s and writes at up to 170MB/s. "