Intel recently announced its latest innovation for mobile devices -- an extremely small solid state drive. Intel has released a tiny solid state drive for portable products like smartphones, mobile Internet devices, and UMPCs. It is smaller than a penny and weighs less than a drop of water, and but is fast, low-power, and rugged.
The Intel Z-P140 is the smallest SSD in its class, 400 times smaller in volume than a 1.8-inch hard disk drive, and at 0.6 grams is 75 times lighter.
Initially it is available in a 2 GB version -- large enough to store a mobile operating system, applications, and data -- and a 4 GB version will be available in mid-2008. It will eventually be available with 16 GB of capacity.
The Z-P140 offers read speeds of 40 MB/s and write speeds of 30 MB/s. Critical to mobile devices, its active power usage is 300 mW, and only 1.1 mW in sleep mode.
It 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.
Intel offers a companion SSD, the Z-U130, which has a standard universal serial bus (USB) interface.
More information on the Z-P140 can be found on Intel's web site.
