Intel has expanded its range of Solid State Disk drives with the 335 series. The drives are a modern version of the 330-series and use the same controller. However, the NAND flash memory used is smaller and more power efficient. The 335-series is currently made up by a single drive with a capacity of 240 GB, sold at about $184. It's expected that more capacities will become available over time. Like the 330 series this drive uses the SF2281 controller from SandForce and it connects to the computer using a SATA-3 interface.
The performance of the drive is pretty similar to the 330 series, sequential read speeds are listed at 500 MB/s and sequential write speeds at 450 MB/s. Random read and writes are specified at 42,000 IOPS for reading and 52.000 IOPS for writing data. According to the first reviews the drive is only a bit faster than the 330 series and due to the old controller can't really compete with faster SSD drives from other brands.
The real difference between the 330 and 335 drives is the used memory. The 330 series has chips manufactured using the 25nm process while the 335 series drive uses memory manufactured using a 20nm process. Besides making it smaller this also makes the drive more power efficient. During normal usage the drive uses 350 mW and idle is uses 275 mW. That's almost half of that the 330 series drives use.
