The “Break it Down” Blog

We have covered Solid State Drives (SSDs) here a lot over the past few months, with the general consensus being that they are small in capacity but fast. Some user comments have suggested that stability and longevity of these devices just isn’t there yet however.

While most of these SSDs are the size of a normal 2.5″ hard drive, Intel has decided to step up and kick the hell out of the competition by introducing their Z-P140 SSD slated for a 2008 release.

The Z-P140 is design as an optional component to Intel’s upcoming Menlow chipset, namely for mobile devices that need a “hard drive”. Besides being roughly the size of a penny and “weighing less than a drop of water” (whatever that means), it also brings to the table the following stats:

• Read speeds of 40 Megabytes-per-second (MB/s)
• Write speeds of 30 MB/s
• Active power use 300mW (milliwatts)
• Sleep mode power use 1.1mW
• 2.5 million hours MTBF (mean-time between failures)

I think it’s clear that 2008 is going to be the year that SSDs go from those “cool, expensive things” to main stream disks in a lot of mobile devices. 2009 will likely be the year where we begin phasing out spindles completely in smaller storage devices or for folks that don’t need 1 TB of space in their laptops.