Intel demos world's smallest solid-state drive

Intel late Friday revealed what it touts as the most miniscule solid-state drive ever released. The Z-P140 is tailored for portable media players, handhelds, and other devices where even the already small 1.8-inch flash drives common to ultraportable notebooks would be too large. The entire drive is no larger than a penny and weighs just 0.02 ounces --as much as a paper clip, the chipmaker says. Regardless of its size, the SSD is still faster than most any flash-based memory card and reads as quickly as 40MB per second while writing at 30MB per second.

The drive is currently ready with 2GB of storage but will be available in a 4GB version by the middle of 2008 and a 16GB version in the future. Combined with a standard Parallel ATA connection, the Z-P140 is capable of serving as an extremely small hard drive for virtually any operating system without needing special controllers, Intel says. The semiconductor firm intends to pair the new solid-state disk with its future Menlow ultra-mobile processor line when it arrives in 2008 but will offer the storage for other processors and platforms.

Filed under: industry, upgrades/storage
Other story tags: Intel, SSD, Menlow