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Intel Confirms It Will Ship 160GB Flash Drives
Lucas123 writes "Intel has confirmed plans to ship a new line of solid-state drives for laptop and notebook PCs with storage capacities of 80GB to 160GB. While it did not lock in a ship date, Intel told Computerworld that the drives would be available in the second quarter. From the story: 'An aggressive move into the laptop and PC notebook flash disk drive business would catapult Intel into direct competition with hard drive manufacturers such as Toshiba Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. that are trying to spark demand before their SATA-based offerings are released in the coming months.'"
It's very difficult to move into an established market, like disk drives. There's tons of technical expertise to acquire, and without your share of patents to negotiate a sharing deal, you're going to be paying through the nose in royalties. You just don't see new disk drive companies popping up. The only way to enter the market is to buy or partner with an existing player.
The shift to flash drives changes all this.
This is Intel's one chance to become a major player in a component that they haven't been involved in until now.
What filesystem (NTFS, ext3, etc) is best for solid-state drives anyways? All of our commom filesystems are written for spinning drives, and certain features (such as ext3 self-defragmentation) probably shorten a flash drives lifespan.
At the show in December, another article said:
"In a short demonstration of an Intel solid-state drive at work in a laptop, Saleski showed that the drive could read and write 680MB of data and related storage in 24 seconds. The read and write speed of the solid state drive will be three to four times faster than that of most hard drives, and it will initially cost as much as three times as much as a hard drive, he said."
If in a year they are twice the price of a regular hard drive, that is a bargain for some of us, if for no other reason that to use it as a swap drive for the OS and scratch drive for Photoshop. It would also making loading game levels much faster, so an 80gb version could make an affordable addition to a regular drive that has the OS.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
"The 160 GB SSD is probably 1-5x the size of your ipod..."
why do you say that? I can buy a 16gb flash drive for $60. Line 10 of those up and you have a 160gb flash drive for $600 that shouldn't be much bigger than a iPhone if you remove the unnecessary plastic and USB ports from the drives.
Imagine a RAID0 array of ten 16gb flash drives! 200+ mByte/sec (ten x 20mB/sec) transfers and access times in nanoseconds vs hard drive milliseconds! No more bottlenecks.
i for one welcome our new flash memory overlords!
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Check our my post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/23/5 It drew a lot of responses from kernel developers.
I'm here today to announce the future availability of 10TB solid-state drives.
Pricing, manufacturing, and delivery date will be announced at a later date.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.