Intel joins the NAND game!

After Samsung, ASUS and others, Intel Corporation announced its entry into the solid state drives market with its Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive. Just like its predecessors, Intel’s NAND drive is a cost-effective solution that delivers high performance and a couple of advantages over the classical hard drives, the most important ones for mobile users being faster boot times, lower power consumption and increased reliability.

The press release issued today by the Santa Clara giant reveals that this product is available in “1 Gigabyte (GB), 2GB, 4GB and 8GB densities”. Even better, the reading speed announced is 28 megabytes (MB) per second, while write operations are performed with 20 MB per second, giving Z-U130’s users “a faster storage alternative that speeds through common PC or embedded application operations such as locating boot code, operating systems and commonly accessed libraries.”, according to Intel.

Leaving the notebooks and PDA’s aside, it’s clear that other systems could take full advantage of this solution too by using a solid state drive for booting and a classic hard drive for additional data storage. While this approach can prove excellent for servers, I am sure that a lot of home users find it useful too, especially since it’s really easy to incorporate it using the USB 2.0 and 1.1 compliant interfaces available.

The amazing reliability of this drive seems to be of about five million hours (!!!) average mean time before failure, estimated by Intel after over 1,000 hours of accelerated testing.

At last, while Z-U130 has just been announced, Intel looks forward already, considering to incorporate the multi-level cell (MLC) technology in future similar products (Z-U130 uses single-level cell technology).

The way things look at this time, the old hard drives may be replaced completely by solid state drives in less than a decade, and the mobile world proves to be a step ahead, as always.