TG Daily has managed to get some additional information about Intel's upcoming consumer SSD drives and the initial 80 and 160GB X18 and X25 SSD drives are expected to have a life span of about 5 years under fairly heavy usage conditions.

Intel is also making a big deal out of all SSD drives not being equal, and although Intel hasn't announced the fastest SSD drives to date, they offer some quite appealing performance figures considering the size they're planning to launch their drives in. Most other manufacturers are sticking with 64 or 128GB, so Intel might have a slight lead here if the price is right.

There's also a lot of talk about wear leveling, something most people aren't aware of when it comes to SSD drives, and as long as the manufacturer of the SSD drives has incorporated this properly, there shouldn't be any major concerns for drive failure or data loss, as there is spare capacity to handle some worn out data blocks. One interesting point is that if you would manage to wear down your SSD drive, in other words manage to wear out the memory chips, then the SSD drive will go into read only mode and no data will be lost.

There are also some interesting performance tests at the end of the article, although we're somewhat skeptical at what competing products Intel has used to compare its SSD drives against, as the results are too good. Considering that a lot of SSD manufacturers only recently have announced new, faster SSD drives, we have a feeling that the ones Intel used to test against are older, slower drivers.

You can find the article here.