Dan Warne03 April 2008, 2:35 PM
IDF Shanghai | Intel will soon be offering a 160GB solid state disk drive, small enough to fit into the MacBook Air.
Yearning for solid state performance, in the world’s thinnest aluminium form factor, but agonizing over whether your digital lifestyle would be cramped by the 64GB drives available in the MacBook Air?
Perhaps you should hold off for now – Intel has revealed that later this year, it be offering its own solid state drives in capacities of up to 160GB, in both the 2.5” size used in most laptops and 1.8” form factor used in MacBook Air. The capacities are 32GB, 64GB, 120GB and 160GB.
Intel is promising massive performance boosts for systems using its solid state hard drives, with ‘equal or better performance to the best flash drives in the industry’. It claims that magnetic disk drives are a system bottleneck in present notebooks, and that SSD “unlocks” the speed of fast processors.
To demonstrate this point, it showed three Vista systems running a video encoding task – one system had a 65nm Merom CPU with a 7200rpm laptop hard drive, one system with the same Merom CPU and and SSD hard drive, and a third system system with a 45nm Penryn CPU and solid state hard drive.
The third system had finished rendering its video before the first system even started the encoding process, suggesting the marriage of a fast CPU and SSD drive can produce very fast results (though, as system specifications were not revealed, it’s hard to know how much other system factors like CPU and RAM played a part in the speed of the process.)
The flash disks will be based on SLC NAND technology – high single level cell flash, where one bit is stored per cell of flash memory – but Intel says it is also working on MLC versions (multilevel cell, where two or more bits are stored in each cell of memory.)
Currently, SLC is a significantly more reliable technology than MLC – each flash cell can be rewritten 100,000 times before corruption problems emerge, whereas MLC is still hovering around the 10,000 rewrite mark.
Intel wouldn’t talk prices yet, but did say that initially it expected the drives to only be included in the most top-end laptops, indicating that its flash drives will be no cheaper than anyone else’s.
However, it is promising 50% price drops in both 2009 and 2010 – though that doesn’t mean in 2010, the drives will be free-of-charge, but rather, 25% of the price that they will be when first released (those sneaky mathematicians at Intel.)
Dan Warne travelled to IDF Shanghai as a guest of Intel.