Intel Jumping into Flash Memory in Hard Drives

Intel Corp. has jumped into the solid state flash drive market with their new Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive. Its based on NAND flash memory with industry standard USB interfaces, the Intel Z-U130 Value Solid State Drive offers cost-effective, high-performance storage for a wide variety of computing and embedded platforms.

Last month as reported here on GameSHOUT, SanDisk Corp. unveiled their new 32-gigabyte 1.8 inch solid state drive. This is designed as a drop-in replacement for the standard hard mechanical drive in todays notebook computers. The new flash drive is currently targeting the OEM commercial market for the "road warrior-type" of business traveler that may be a little rough on their computers and needs something more reliable and rugged.

Intel's Z-U130 Value Solid State Drive is the company's first solution in the Intel Value Solid State Drive family that will offer different industry standard interfaces and densities. The product comes in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB densities. With fast reads of 28MB per second and write speeds of 20MB per second, this higher performing solid state drive is a faster storage alternative that speeds through common PC or embedded application operations such as locating boot code, operating systems and commonly accessed libraries.

The new drives are set to be used in a variety of Intel-based computing platforms, such as servers, emerging market notebooks and low-cost, fully featured PCs. In addition, it will be used in Intel embedded solutions for routers and point of sale terminals.