Intel 311 SLC SSD and Smart Response Technology
A
A lot of the work we do in the Embedded PC market hinges around SLC flash drives. For consumer applications we use lower cost MLC drives because you get great performance and more space but for a lot of industrial applications there's too much risk of the drives burning out. Algorithms that manage wear leveling have gotten a lot better on the MLC side but for SLC we've really depended on companies like Innodisk whose product line is expensive per GB.
Intel now has a 20GB SLC SSD at about £6 per GB and with much faster performance and we'll soon be offering it on our embedded PC range.
What's really cool about this technology though is that it features SRT (though this requires the Z68 Chipset): you can massively speed up hard drive performance by using this as cache. That is GREAT for a server application and we tested this in-house with our FreeNAS box. You take a low cost 2TB drive and make it perform much faster by writing everything to the SLC drive. You don't have to worry about burn-out because it's SLC. Note: we did this with an Innodisk SLC 1GB eUSB flash module but the principal is the same.
As usual Anandtech has a great writeup which I'd recommend.