Intel Introduces Industry's Smallest Solid-State Drive (SSD)

[malware]

The Intel Z-P140 PATA Solid-State Drive is smaller than a penny and weighs less than a drop of water. These ultra-small devices are fast, low-powered and rugged, with the right size, capacity and performance for ultra-small mobile internet devices, digital entertainment and embedded products. The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD is part of the proposed Intel "Menlow" platform. The chips come in 2 Gigabyte (GB) and 4GB densities, extendable to 16GB.



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[mrw1986]

I want 250 4gb ones

Make that 64 16gb ones

 

[cdawall]

how is a SSD any different than one of these plugged into a flash to IDE converter(this)?

heres one off newegg...click me

 

[wtf8269]

...for ultra-small mobile internet devices, digital entertainment and embedded products.

...and really 'effin small USB drives!

 

[eidairaman1]

problem with them, easier to lose, and if they are so "rugged" they would be able to withstand extreme heat, cold, wet, and also Static Discharge.

 

[Disparia]

how is a SSD any different than one of these plugged into a flash to IDE converter(this)?

heres one off newegg...click me

Speed and durability, mainly.

Speed can be helped by using something like this: http://addonics.com/products/flash_memory_reader/ad4cfprj.asp

Still have the problem of durability, but would be nice in a low-write, high-read environment.

 

[Sasqui]

No mention of performance.

And... I have a 4gb trans flash that looks smaller.

So we should all be proud of small

 

[jocksteeluk]

how heavy and how big of a drop of water do they mean?

 

[effmaster]

how heavy and how big of a drop of water do they mean?

The normal ones that you put in your eyes when you do what the doctor tells you tell with your eyedrops

Ths can mean extremely large flash drives. I can already see it, the ability to put in 6 of these in one flash drive thereby enabling 24 GB of space

 

[mdm-adph]

The chips come in 2 Gigabyte (GB) and 4GB densities, extendable to 16GB.

So... they come in 16GB sizes? I don't get it.

 

[mas0n]

how is a SSD any different than one of these plugged into a flash to IDE converter(this)?

heres one off newegg...click me

The flash memory found in Compact Flash and Secure Digital cards is nowhere near the quality found in a good SSD. If you hooked a compact flash card up to IDE and use it as your boot disk, you'd be dead in the water in a few months after the card had reached it's maximum rewrite potential. Also even the best CF cards are SLOW. A good SSD will sustain >100MB/s with random access times in the sub-millisecond range.

 

[Sasqui]

The flash memory found in Compact Flash and Secure Digital cards is nowhere near the quality found in a good SSD.

"SSD" - Solid State Disk. It doesn't imply how fast it is - even a shitty thumb drive is considered an "SSD", right?

 

[mas0n]

solid state drives, USB flash drives, flash drives, etc. generally all use the same type of Flash Memory. The names are used just to classify their intended use. Yes, you could argue that a USB flash drive is also a SSD and I could argue that it is not, because SSD are flash memory based drives that are intended to replace a hard disk drive and as such use much higher quality memories. Yet, a third person could argue that even using the term "drive" to describe any of the above is erroneous and they too would be correct.

Along that point, the Lexar ExpressCard Flash Drives that are being marketed as "SSD" use the same quality flash memory found in CF and SD cards and therefore have dismal performance. High quality SSD perform 10X better in all regards.