Intel announces Solid State NAND flash drives
Tech News By Steve Ragan
The Intel Z-U130 is based on NAND flash memory and is compatible with USB 1.1 and 2.0 standards. The drive says Intel will offer high-performance storage on a wide variety of computing and embedded platforms.
The advantages over standard hard disk drives and USB storage devices, the Solid State Drives from Intel are promised to offer faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid access to data, and like their recently announced Xeon L5310 and L5320 processors, lower power consumption. Power usage is the new driving force in the hardware market today, over the last three months; Intel, AMD, Samsung, Sony, and Hitachi have all offered products with increased performance, and lower power usage. Intel and AMD are still heating up and both plan to introduce more products that are aimed at performance and power reduction as well as cost savings later this year.
The Z-U130 comes in 1 Gigabyte (GB), 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB densities. “With fast reads of 28 megabytes (MB) per second and write speeds of 20 MB 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,” Intel said in a statement.
“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.”
The Z-U130 will also work with several existing Intel based platforms. Servers, laptops, desktops, and Intel also plan to use the Solid-State family line of products in upcoming routers and point of sale (POS) terminals. According to Intel, the 8GB model of the Solid-State family would be available during the fourth quarter of 2007. They plan an initial price point similar to that of other comparable products on the market today, and say that their retail price will be slightly lower. Expect to see these in your local computer store, and in some hardware shipping soon.
