The exterior of the drive is very robust. A full metal cover feels a little on the heavy side but also like it is built to last. The top of the SSD has a metallic effect paint job and while our sample is a very early offering, we expect retail editions to feature a picture of Intel’s 'Skulltrail' emblem signifying that this drive is of the highest calibre.


Breaking open the SSD the first thing that catches our eye are the twin capacitors meaning should your PC shutdown unexpectedly during mid write, there will be enough power left to finish writing small files so you date will not be lost.

This SSD is effectively a serve grade component, the Datacenter S3500 drive. To make the drive fast enough for us enthusiasts, Intel have increased the clockspeed of both the NAND and the controller.


The 10 x 20nm MLC NAND chips run at 100MHz which is a 17% increase over the same chips found on the S3500, a humble but welcome increase.


The SSD also comes with 2x512MB (1GB) 1600MHz DRAM cache courtesy of Micron.


Perhaps the most significant feature of the drive is the controller which has seen a large increase in clockspeed from 400MHz to 600MHz. To reach this clockspeed we suspect that Intel have employed a speed binning process, reserving on the very best 'Tisdale' silicon for their Intel 730 drives.