Blog of Tushar Phadke

Intel Debuts the ZU130 SSD

Intel has marked its foray into solid state drives with the Z-U130 Value Solid State Drive (SSD) based on Nand flash memory.

With industry standard USB interfaces, the Z-U130 Value SSD offers cost-effective, high-performance storage for a wide variety of computing and embedded platforms. Intel says its SSD delivers faster boot times, embedded code storage, rapid data access, and low-power storage alternatives for value PCs, routers, servers, gaming, and industrial applications.

Randy Wilhelm, Vice President and General Manager of Nand Products Group at Intel, said, “Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives, including improved performance and reliability. The Intel solid state drive technology provides robust performance, while offering Intel’s industry leading quality, validation, and reliability for a wide variety of embedded applications.”

With fast read speeds of 28 megabytes (MB) and write speeds of 20 MB per second, this SSD is a faster storage alternative The drives will be used in a variety of Intel-based computing platforms, such as servers, emerging market notebooks, and low-cost, fully featured PCs, as well as in embedded solutions like routers and point-of-sale terminals.

Moreover, the Z-U130 Value SSD will have extensive validation, including more than 1,000 hours of accelerated reliability testing. It is also expected to meet an average mean time between failure (MTBF) specifications of five million hours.

Intel believes that the product can be easily integrated into original design manufacturers’ designs because of its USB 2.0 and 1.1 compliant interfaces, 2×5 USB connector, and standard single-level cell Nand in thin small outline package (TSOP).

Offering different industry standard interfaces and densities, the Z-U130 Value SSD is the first from the company, and comes in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB densities. While the 8GB model will be in production after 2008, higher capacity versions are expected in one year’s time.