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Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Intel tips ultra small solid-state drive for handheld apps

Intel Corp. announced its latest entry into the solid-state drive market with the Intel Z-P140 PATA solid-state drive designed for handheld mobile devices. Smaller than a penny and weighing less than a drop of water, these 2Gbyte and 4Gbyte ultrasmall devices are fast, low-power and rugged, with the right size, capacity and performance for mobile Internet devices, digital entertainment and embedded products, said Intel.

SSDs use flash memory to store operating systems and computing data, emulating hard drives. The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD has an industry standard parallel-ATA (PATA) interface and is optimized to enhance Intel-based computers, and will be an optional part of Intel's Menlow platform for mobile Internet devices debuting in 2008.

The Intel Z-P140 is the smallest SSD in its class, making it attractive to designers and manufacturers of mobile and ultra-mobile devices. Comparatively, the Intel Z-P140 is 400 times smaller in volume than a 1.8-inch HDD, and at 0.6g is 75x lighter. It is also a much more durable alternative to HDDs.

The 2Gbyte and 4Gbyte capacities are large enough to store mobile operating systems, applications and data such as music or photos. It is extendable to 16Gbyte for added storage capacity.

"Our mission is to provide world-class non-volatile SSD and caching solutions that are designed, optimized and validated to enhance Intel Architecture-based computing platforms," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for Intel's NAND products group. "Our customers are finding the Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD to be the right size, fit and performance for their pocketable designs. This is Intel's latest offering as we continue to expand our product line of reliable, feature-rich and high-performing SSDs."

The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD offers read speeds of 40MBps and write speeds of 30MBps. Critical to mobile applications, its active power usage is 300mW, and only 1.1mW in sleep mode, which helps to extend a device's battery life.

With a 2.5 million hours MTBF rate, this PATA-based chip scale package delivers reliable solid-state performance in an extremely tiny footprint. The Intel Z-P140 is currently sampling with mass production scheduled in the first quarter of 2008. The 4Gbyte version will follow the 2Gbyte product.

The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD adds to the current Intel Z-U130 USB Solid-State Drive family introduced last March. The Intel Z-U130 USB Solid-State Drive has a USB standard interface and is used as a faster storage alternative for a variety of Intel-based computing platforms such as servers, emerging market notebooks and low-cost PCs as well as embedded solutions.

Intel has also demonstrated technology for future high-performance SSDs with a serial ATA interface that will round out the full family of Intel SSD offerings. The technology will be announced as a product line in 2008.

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