Intel to make 160GB solid state disks

Posted at: 5:30am 2nd April 2008 by David Fearon in Shanghai

In a surprise announcement at IDF, Intel says that it’s going to make a 160GB SSD

Intel has been mucking around with NAND flash memory for a while now, but it’s just shaken the storage industry at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai (IDF) by announcing that it’s planning to make its own solid state disks (SSDs).

The move has nonplussed even some of Intel UK's own people, who claimed that they'd seen and heard nothing about it until the announcement during Intel's Dadi Perlmutter's mobile-computing keynote speech. It represents a foray into a completely new market for the company and will worry current mobile hard-disk manufacturers.

Not only is Intel's entry into SSDs a surprising and potentially industry-shaking move, but the little information that's been announced gives even more cause for competitors to be concerned. The single slide devoted to the topic during Perlmutter's keynote claimed that Intel could make SSDs with capacities ranging from 32GB up to an amazing 160GB. This is even larger than the 128GB SSDs announced by Samsung in January.

The disks will be in S-ATA form only, and will come in 1.8in and 2.5in versions to be a direct drop-in replacement for standard mechanical S-ATA disks. SSDs' strengths are lower power consumption, greater shock resistance than the relatively delicate mechanism of a normal hard disk and potentially better performance. Intel is claiming shock resistance of 1,500G. By contrast, a typical mechanical disk can only survive a 300-400G shock while it's operating.

Intel is also implying that it will improve on the relatively disappointing performance of solid-state disks up until now, with a demonstration of an SSD-equipped laptop against a standard one showing applications apparently loading up near-instantly.