Intel has unveiled their new Z-P140 PATA SSD, a solid state drive that it claims is the smallest ever.
The drive is 12 mm tall, 8 mm wide, 1.8 mm thick and weighs 0.6 grams. Instead of spinning platters, solid state drives (SSD) use nonvolatile flash memory to store data, have no moving parts, use less power and boot much faster than current platter HDDs. Currently, the most interest for SSD is coming from laptop manufacturers, with many already offering systems with SSD as an optional HDD replacement.
Intel however, is aiming at the mobile market with this new SSD, with devices such as smart phones and GPS units not needing hundreds of gigabytes of disk space. The biggest solid state drives currently available are only 128GB, but with size records constantly being broken, it’ll only be a matter of time before we see 320GB and 500GB drives available.
PC users won’t have to worry about SSDs for a few more years, as the current prices for SDDs are extremely high when compared to HDDs, and as mentioned above, the sizes are no where near as large. The benifits are yet to outweigh the costs, but as with all new technologies, that is bound to change.
[via PCMagazine]
