News

posted on 10 March 2008 08:59

An Intel product manager has said the company will introduce flash solid state disks (SSDs) up to 160GB in capacity in the second quarter of this year.

This is coincident with Intel CEO Paul Otellini saying last week that Intel will fix the problems in its NAND flash business.

It means that Intel, partnering Micron in IM Flash Technologies, is going to throw its fabrication and partnering might into the flash SSD market and compete strongly with incumbents BitMicro, Samsung, SanDisk and STEC. It will offer both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factor SSDs plus a SATA II interface, according to Troy Winslow, Intel's NAND Products Group marketing manager.

That means Intel's SSDs could be dropped into drive arrays or computer storage bays built for a 2.5-inch SATA hard disk drive (HDD). The SATA interface, at 3Gbit/s, is faster than Intel's current parallel ATA interface. In this respect Intel is merely catching up with Samsung and other suppliers.

The company will use multi-level cell (MLC) technology as a way of increasing capacity over single-level cell products. It has technology, it says, which will  solve slow writing speed problems with MLC chips. (Intel Value SSD pictured.)

Winslow said the Intel's SSD would read data much faster than the current rate from other suppliers of 100MB/sec or so.

Intel has the idea that it should be very well-placed to supply a combined package to computer manufacturers of CPU chip, support chipset, graphics chip and SSD.

It is promoting the concept of flash SSD technology as a tremendous performance accelerator compared to, relatively, slow hard drives. In a video-on demand scenario it replaced 62 15K rpm SATA disk drives with ten SATA SSDs and streamed 4,000 videos in parallel.

The increased supplier competion will tend to accelerate flash SSD price declines, which should increase the technology's use as a performance-centric HDD replacement.

[Phil Robson, news editor.]