Intel Introduces Ultra-Small Solid-State Drive for Handheld Devices

December 17, 2007

Intel Corporation announced its latest entry into the solid-state drive market with the Intel Z-P140 PATA Solid-State Drive (SSD), one of the tiniest in the industry aimed at handheld mobile devices. Smaller than a penny and weighing less than a drop of water, these 2 Gigabyte and 4GB ultra-small devices are fast, low-power and rugged, with the right size, capacity and performance for mobile Internet devices, digital entertainment and embedded products.

SSDs use flash memory to store operating systems and computing data, emulating hard drives. The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD has an industry standard parallel-ATA (PATA) interface and is optimized to enhance Intel-based computers, and will be an optional part of Intel's Menlow platform for mobile Internet devices debuting in 2008.

The Intel Z-P140 is the smallest SSD in its class, making it attractive to designers and manufacturers of mobile and ultra-mobile devices. Comparatively, the Intel Z-P140 is 400 times smaller in volume than a 1.8-inch hard disk drive (HDD), and at .6 grams is 75 times lighter. It is also a much more durable alternative to HDDs.

The 2GB and 4GB capacities are large enough to store mobile operating systems, applications and data such as music or photos. It is extendable to 16GB for added storage capacity.

"Our mission is to provide world-class non-volatile SSD and caching solutions that are designed, optimized and validated to enhance Intel Architecture-based computing platforms," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for Intel's NAND Products Group. "Our customers are finding the Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD to be the right size, fit and performance for their pocketable designs. This is Intel's latest offering as we continue to expand our product line of reliable, feature-rich and high-performing SSDs."

The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD offers read speeds of 40 Megabytes-per-second (MB/s) and write speeds of 30 MB/s. Critical to mobile applications, its active power usage is 300mW (milliwatts), and only 1.1mW in sleep mode, which helps to extend a device's battery life.

With a 2.5 million hours mean-time between failures (MTBF) rate, this PATA-based chip scale package delivers reliable solid-state performance in an extremely tiny footprint. The Intel Z-P140 is currently sampling with mass production scheduled in the first quarter of 2008. The 4GB version will follow the 2GB product.

The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD adds to the current Intel Z-U130 USB Solid-State Drive family introduced last March. The Intel Z-U130 USB Solid-State Drive has a universal serial bus (USB) standard interface and is used as a faster storage alternative for a variety of Intel-based computing platforms such as servers, emerging market notebooks and low-cost PCs as well as embedded solutions.

The company has also demonstrated technology for future high-performance SSDs with a serial ATA (SATA) interface that will round out the full family of Intel SSD offerings. That technology is expected to be announced as a product line in 2008.

Source: Intel