Intel has been working on its third generation of solid state drives for quite some time and as you all probably know, these will be based on 25nm NAND MLC chips and should provide decent write/read performance boost when compared to the previous generation. Anandtech managed to get some details regarding these upcoming SSDs and it will be quite interesting to see them compared to the competition once these show up in retail.

The G3 series of Intel SSDs will follow similar naming scheme as the previous generation so you can expect the X25-M as a part of the consumer line and X25-E G3 as a part of the enterprise line. The X25-M will be available as a 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch version and the only difference is the maximum capacity as the 1.8-inch will top out at 300GB while the 2.5-inch will be available in capacities of up to 600GB. The X25-E will top out at 400GB.

The first, and most noticable difference is the presence of the off-controller DRAM. Intel claims that it managed to include a "power safe write cache" which means that it simply might end up with a large external DRAM. The second big feature on the 3rd-gen Intel SSD line is the AES-128 encryption support.

The X25-M is rated at 250MB/s for read and 170MB/s for write while the 4K performance ends up at 40,000 IOPS for write and 50,000 IOPS for read. The X25-E, codename Lyndonville, on the other hand uses 25nm eMLC NAND and as noted, will be available in 100, 200 and 400GB capacities. This one is rated at 250MB/s for read and 200MB/s for write, so a bit higher than the consumer part. It has 4k performance of 50K IOPS for read and 5K IOPS for write.

The drives should should reach mass availability sometime in Q4 2010 to Q1 2011 timeframe so we are pretty sure that it will be interesting to see them compared to the rest of the competition.

You can find the full report over at Anandtech.com.