Intel will next quarter introduce several new high-speed solid state drives (SSDs) including a new 160GB; double the capacity of the current drive used in the MacBook Air.
The new drives are expected to be 2.5-inch drives as well as 1.8-inch, the latter being compatible with the MacBook Air.
Intel’s NAND chief Troy Winslow also told News.com that the new Intel drives will boast transfer rates far superior to any existing offers.
With new competition, drive speeds will jump. Currently, the fastest SSDs from companies like Samsung approach 100MB/second for reading data. “What I can tell you is ours is much better than that,” Winslow said. Hard drives typically read data at about half this speed
The chief also added that the entire product line will include SATAII interfaces, delivering up to 3Gbps.
Finally the price of SSDs is expected to drop considerably over the next few years. It costs upwards of $1000 to use an SSD in a notebook these days but by 2010 this price could be reduced to just $200.
“Price declines are historically 40 percent per year,” said Winslow. “And in 2009, a 50 percent reduction, then again in 2010.
Finally Winslow highlighted the increasing role SSDs are playing in the server market due to the ability to accelerate performance more than sixfold when compared to even the highest performing traditional hard drives.
Winslow said that Intel recently did a video-on-demand demonstration where it streamed 4,000 videos simultaneously. Just to do the streaming (not to store the video), it took 62 15,000 RPM (very high-performance) hard drives, he said. “We were able to replace those 62 hard drives with 10 SATA (SSD) technology drives,” he said.
