Intel officially announced the new SSD 320 Series drives yesterday, which feature proprietary Intel SSD processors paired to cutting edge 25nm NAND flash memory. This new family of drives, however, isn't geared for ultra-high performance. While still fast, the overarching goals with the Intel SSD 320 series were increased reliability and security. In fact, despite being released after the SSD 510 series which we took a look at a few weeks back, these technically newer 320 series drives do not feature support for the faster SATA III interface. The Intel SSD 320 series drives are SATA II only.

We've got an Intel SSD 320 series 300GB drive on hand and have run it through a complete suite of tests to gauge its performance versus competing solid state offerings...