With SSDs, capacity affects performance. The greater the capacity, the better the performance. That's because SSDs are built with multiple parallel I/O channels from the drive's controller chip to the NAND flash chips that store data. Generally, the greater the number of NAND flash chips, the greater the number of parallel channels or bandwidth to access the data on those flash chips.

SSDs with capacities of 64GB or more are typically built on eight-channel architectures, according to Yang. Micron Corp.'s RealSSD C300 drive, which has a capacity of 256GB, has the largest number of channels for a consumer-class drive, with 16.

Prior to the X25-V, Intel sold two SSD lines, the for data center server applications and the for consumer products. Both the X18-M and X25-M SSD models are marketed for laptop and netbook computers. They come in 1.8-in. and 2.5-in. form factors, respectively.

The X25-M drive has a 10-channel architecture and comes in 80GB and 160GB capacities and has sequential of up to 250MB/sec. and 100MB/sec., respectively. An 80GB X25-M SSD for around $230 at online sites like Pricegrabber.com.

Intel's new X25-V is built on a five-channel architecture and has 10 4GB NAND flash chips. It has sequential read/write speeds of 170MB/sec. and 35MB/sec. With 4KB random reads, the drive can produce up to 25,000 I/O operations per second for reads and 2,500 I/O per second for writes.