Intel Locks with SanDisk and Samsung over Solid-State Drives

Intel on Monday jumped into solid state drives market with the Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive, company’s first NAND Flash Memory based product that Intel hopes would challenge Samsung Corp., which is the world's largest producer of NAND flash memory for hardware and gadgets like USB flash drives.

Using the industry standard USB interfaces, the Intel Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive would come in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB densities. The drive can be integrated into the equipment designs of manufacturing companies through its USB 2.0 and 1.1 compliant interfaces, 2x5 USB connector and standard single-level cell NAND in thin small outline package (TSOP) devices.

Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, said the flash drive comes with fast reads of 28MB/second and write speeds of 20MB/second, and can be used in everything from servers and PCs to gaming consoles.

This higher performing solid state drive is a faster storage alternative that speeds through common PC or embedded application operations like locating boot code, operating systems and commonly accessed libraries, Intel said. Solid-state drives deliver rapid data access and low-power storage alternatives for value PCs, routers, servers, and gaming and industrial applications.

Instead of using the ATA or SATA, the company has opted to use a USB interface, which would have allowed manufacturers to instantly employ the drives as direct replacements for rotating magnetic disks.

"Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability," said Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager of Intel's NAND Products Group. "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."

Intel that develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live would face competition from other industry-leading products from companies such as SanDisk Corp. and Samsung.

SanDisk announced a 32GB solid-state disk product in January, while Samsung has recently announced its first hybrid drive, which uses NAND flash memory with spinning disk and comes in 80GB, 120GB and 160GB capacities, along with 4GB of flash memory for caching data, trailing Intel four times behind in terms of capacity.

The Z-U130 has an average mean time between failure (MTBF) specifications of 5 million hours, compared with SanDisk, which touts an MTBF of 2 million hours.

The drive that offers "cost-effective," high-performance storage with advantages over hard disk drives or removable Universal Serial Bus storage devices will be used in a variety of Intel-based computing platforms for servers, notebooks, and low-cost PCs. It will also be used in Intel's embedded technology for routers and point of sale terminals.

Intel has already entered into agreements with server, notebook and PC manufacturers to include the Z-U130.

Meanwhile the company has introduced two energy efficient 50-watt quad core processors that expand the current lineup of Xeon quad-core processors.

The two processors are the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor L5320 and L5310 and operate at 1.86 GHz and 1.60 GHz, respectively. These 50-watt quad core processors feature a unique 8 megabytes (MB) of on die cache for faster memory data communication and run on dedicated 1066 MHz front side buses.

The L5320 and L5310, priced at $519 and $455 per 1,000 unit, respectively will consume 30-60 percent less energy than the other 80 and 120-watt Intel Xeon Quad-Cores.