Intel Targets Solid State Drives At Servers

Written by Adam Gosling

Tuesday, 13 March 2007

Intel has announced a solid state hard disk replacement alternative which it belives willsee its way into servers, mobile computers and even low-cost desktops. The Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive uses NAND flash memory with an industry standard USB interface to offer cost-effective, high-performance storage that will see the company entering what is in essence a part of the hardware industry it hasn't competed in before now. Solid state disk drives use less power, promise significant speed and boot time improvements while also imrpoving reliability. They outperform the industry standard spinning nmagnetic disks in virtually every paramter except price, but with the cost of Flash memeory steadily falling such drives are becoming amore viable alternative. "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 Intel Z-U130 Value Solid State Drive is the company's first solution in the Intel Value Solid State Drive family that will offer different industry standard interfaces and densities. The product comes in 1 Gigabyte (GB), 2GB, 4GB and 8GB densities. With fast reads of 28 megabytes (MB) per second and write speeds of 20 MB per second, this higher performing solid state drive is a faster storage alternative that speeds through common PC or embedded application operations such as locating boot code, operating systems and commonly accessed libraries. The drives will also be used in a variety of Intel-based computing platforms, such as servers, emerging market notebooks and low-cost, fully featured PCs. In addition, it will be used in Intel embedded solutions for routers and point of sale terminals. Intel's Z-U130 Value Solid State Drive will be distinguished from other solid state product offerings by its extensive validation, including more than 1,000 hours of accelerated reliability testing, and is expected to meet an average mean time between failure (MTBF) specification of five million hours. The product can be easily integrated into original design manufacturers' 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 (TSOP) devices. The company is also considering next-generation products that could incorporate cost-effective multi-level cell (MLC) technology. Related news items New Flash Memeory Card Standard Coming -16/09/2007 Broadcom Enthusisam for 802.11n Wavers -06/09/2007 Palm Deletes Foleo Folly -05/09/2007 Sydney Airport Network Improved For APEC -03/09/2007 ASUS A686/696 GPS PDA -23/08/2007 Newer news items Samsung's Announces 16Gb Flash -30/04/2007 Dell Drives Into Solid State Storage -29/04/2007 SSD Drive LifeBook Only For High Rollers -20/03/2007 Solid State Drive Prices Falling Fast -16/03/2007 SanDisk Adds To SSD Trend -15/03/2007 Older news items Hybrid Drive Reduces Crash Risk -07/03/2007 Solid State SanDisk Disc -04/01/2007 WD Portable Drive With Panache -20/11/2006 Samsung Puts 1GB Storage On A SIM -09/11/2006 160 GB WD Drives Have Own Shock Prevention -18/09/2006 Tag This Now: