Ian Grayson19 December 2007, 3:24 AM
With temperatures in the flash-based storage market reaching red hot, Intel has announced a new line of solid state disks that weigh less that a drop of water.
With an eye firmly on the rapidly growing market for mobile devices, chip giant Intel has announced a new SSD device that can store up to 16GB in a space the size of a small coin.
The Z-P140 comes in 2, 4, 8 and 16GB models and weighs just 0.6 grams - about the same as a drop of water. Samples are in the maket already and full production is expected to begin early next year.
 Z-P140: in a greatly magnified state! |
The new drives are part of Intel's Menlow chipset which has been designed from the ground up for use in mobile internet devices. Such devices have traditionally been limited by factors such as power consumption and storage capacities. Switching to SSDs addresses both these challenges.
The Z-P140 uses an industry-standard PATA interface and is significantly smaller than a hard drive with similar storage capacity. With no moving parts it is well suited to applications where devices can expect to receive their fair share of bumps and jolts during use.
Intel quotes read times of 40 megabytes per second and write times of 30 MB/s for the drives. Power consumption is rated at a miserly 1.1 miliwatts when idle and 300 mW when operating.
No pricing has yet been announced for the drives.