Intel Bursts Onto Solid State Storage Scene

By Greg McNevin

March 14, 2007: Intel has thrown its weight into the flash memory ring and squared up to Samsung and SanDisk with its new Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive.

The move is great news for those eagerly awaiting the arrival of high-performance solid state technology. Naturally Intel is promising to deliver faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid data access and low-power storage with the Z-U130. For notebook users, this also more compact machines, longer battery life and performance that outstrips a RAID array.

With read/writes speeds of 28MB/second and 20MB/second respectively and USB interface, Intel is pitching its 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB chips at everything from servers and gaming consoles to routers and point of sale terminals.

Next to Samsung’s recently announced hybrid drives and SanDisk’s 32GB all-flash memory notebook drive, the move indicates that the industry is slowly but surely making the very welcome move to solid state storage for notebooks.

While coming in at barely a just a quarter of the size of competing products, IBM’s technology boasts an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours compared with SanDisk’s top of 2 million hours.

"Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability," said Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager of Intel's NAND Products Group. "The Intel solid state drive technology provides robust performance, while offering Intel's industry leading quality, validation and reliability for a wide variety of embedded applications."

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