Intel aims to replace HDD with solid state NAND flash drives

By Ann Steffora Mutschler -- Electronic News, 3/12/2007

Based on NAND flash memory with a standard USB interface, Santa Clara, CA-based Intel Corp. today marked its entry into the solid state disk drive market with its Z-U130 Value solid-state drive, aimed at cost-effective, high-performance storage for computing and embedded applications.

Touting advantages over hard disk drive (HDD) or removable universal serial bus (USB) storage devices, Intel says its solid state drives deliver faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid data access and low-power storage alternatives for value PCs, routers, servers, gaming and industrial applications.

Randy Wilhelm, VP and general manager of Intel’s NAND products group said during a press briefing last week that solid state drive technology offers benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability.

The Z-U130 is Intel’s first product in its value-oriented solid state drive family, meant to allow different industry-standard interfaces and densities.

This first product comes in 1-, 2-, 4- and 8-gigabyte densities, with read time of 28-megabytes per second and write speeds of 20-megabytes per second and is meant to serve as an alternative for common PC or embedded application operations such as locating boot code, operating systems and commonly accessed libraries, Intel noted.

The drives are expected to also be used in a variety of Intel-based computing platforms, such as servers, emerging market notebooks, low-cost, fully featured PCs, as well as in Intel embedded solutions for routers and point of sale terminals.

Intel put its Z-U130 value solid state drive through more than 1,000 hours of accelerated reliability testing, and is expected to meet an average mean time between failure specification of five million hours.

The product is meant to be easily integrated into ODM designs because of its USB 2.0 and 1.1 compliant interfaces, 2x5 USB connector and standard single-level cell NAND in thin small outline package devices.

Finally, Intel said it is also considering next-generation products that could incorporate its multi-level cell technology.