Intel says it has found a way to produce solid state drives at less than half the existing price. It could be the last step to making the technology a serious mass-market alternative to traditional hard drives.

Back in November, we reported that SanDisk had developed a way to make the drives work much more quickly and last longer. At the time, we noted the technology still had other barriers, including not working to full capacity with Vista and being expensive in comparison to traditional storage systems.

Microsoft then announced that Windows 7 would go some way towards making best use of the drives. However, there are still problems with the way a solid state drive is split into sections of data which are larger than Windows can handle at any one time.

Now Intel says it can cut production costs by as much as 60 percent, through a remarkably simple (if not easy) change. It is now able to use 34 nanometer Flash memory chips rather than the current 50 nanometer models. That literally minute change means the machines used to produce the chips can make more at once, thus dropping costs.

The effects are pretty substantial: the price Intel charges wholesalers for an 80GB SSD will fall from $595 to $225, while the 160GB model drops from $945 to $440.

That’s enough of a cut that more hardware manufacturers will consider using an SSD rather than a traditional hard drive, particularly in laptops where the advantages of smaller size, less running noise and greater resilience are particularly relevant. Intel says performance on the new drives is not only equal to its predecessors, but that both reading and writing speeds are significantly increased.

The firm isn’t releasing a 320GB model using the new technology, likely because the costs (which would be in the $800 range) would be too high to attract a mainstream audience.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 at 12:51 pm under Intel, Storage.

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