The Z-u130 marks Intel’s entry into solid state drives with superior performance and reliability over the mechanical hard disks we’ve been accustomed to. Based on NAND flash memory, more commonly used in USB Flash drives, the Intel Z-u130 offers a cost-effective, high-performance storage solution for a wide range of computing platforms.

While it remains more expensive than its mechanical counterpart, solid state drives offer advantages such as faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid data access, higher security, and significantly lower power consumption.

“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, with an average mean time between failure of 5 million hours, comes in 1, 2, 4, and 8 Gigabyte densities, and has a read and write speed of 28 MB/second and 20 MB/second, respectively. These new solid state drives will be used in Intel-based computing platforms such as servers, notebooks, PCs, and looks to soon be a contender with Samsung and Sandisk’s solid state disk (SSD) war in the near future.

Samsung is currently offering a 32 Gigabyte SSD, and Sandisk will also have a 32 GB model available in the first half of 2007; although, Samsung uses a 50-nanometer process technology which offers substantially higher read/write times over other SSD alternatives.

Due to the large price tag, SSDs are currently aimed at enterprise and corporate users, but should prove to be widely used by the consumer market after the technologies advance and prices decrease.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 6:01 am under Intel, Storage.

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