Business Tech

Intel is introducing new solid-state drives with increased performance as these devices find a more welcome home in Windows 7.

Intel said Tuesday it is moving to a more advanced 34-nanometer manufacturing process for its X series of solid-state drives (SSDs). To date, Intel has built drives on a 50-nanometer process. The more advanced process allows for higher data densities, enabling Intel to pack more data onto the same number of flash chips and reduce cost.

Solid-state drives typically offer better performance--in some cases, dramatically better performance--than hard disk drives. But SSDs cost more per gigabyte than hard drives, limiting their use to performance-sensitive applications such as high-end laptops, gaming PCs, and servers.

(Credit: Intel)

The new price for the 80GB version of the X25-M drive is $225 for quantities up to 1,000 units, a 60 percent reduction from the introduction price of $595 a year ago, Intel said. The 160GB version of the Intel X25-M drive is now $440, down from $945 at introduction.

However, the actual price drop in the market will be lower, Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, said in a phone interview. Intel had already announced an interim price reduction in January, below the original $595 and $945 price tags, he said.

"In the marketplace it will be around a $100 drop on the 80GB drive and almost a $200 drop on the 160GB drive," he said. The X25-M comes in a standard 2.5-inch form factor, which is the size of most hard drives used in laptops.

Winslow also addressed rumors circulating on Monday about higher-capacity drives. Intel will not introduce a 320GB SSD this year, he said. "What we decided to do is split 34-nanometer into a two-step process," he said. The first step will be to cost-reduce existing 80GB and 160GB drives. "And what we'll do later--and it's not even going to be this year but first half of next year--we will introduce, also on 34 nanometer, a performance enhancement and a doubling of the capacity," Winslow said, meaning that larger capacity drives, such as those over 300GB, won't appear until next year.

SAN FRANCISCO--Intel will finally enter the high-capacity solid-state drive business with the goal of replacing hard-disk drives in both consumer and corporate markets.

Inside an Intel solid state drive

(Credit: Intel)

This comes 20 years after Intel introduced its first flash memory--a 256KB flash chip in 1988. The world's largest chipmaker is announcing the line of solid-state drives at the Intel Developer Forum here.

The presence of Intel will intensify an already intensely competitive market. "Intel's entry into the SSD market has been expected for a while and although a bit delayed, represents the start of what we expect to be a very competitive market," said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities.

Initially, Intel will have 80GB and 160GB solid-state drives based on multilevel cell (MLC) technology for the consumer and notebook markets, and 32GB and 64GB drives based on single-level cell (SLC) for the enterprise market. In 2009, Intel expects to have MLC drives with capacities up to 320GB.

MLC allows drive makers to build higher-capacity drives at lower cost but is not as fast as SLC nor inherently as reliable. Though SLC solid-state drives are used currently in some ultralight laptops, in most cases they will be replaced by MLC drives in future laptop models.

"The new generation of MLC-based products are an improvement over the initial SSD offerings which had a host of issues," Cohen said. "SSDs are ideally suited for the netbook category and will eventually replace (high-performance) hard-disk drives in the enterprise segment."

But most notebooks will continue to use hard-disk drives, Cohen said. "We expect mainstream notebooks to continue to utilize HDDs for the foreseeable future."

The "E" identifier on Intel solid-state drives will indicate "extreme" for SLC drives, and "M" will be associated with mainstream MLC units.

"The MLC will go into production in the next 30 days and the SLC in the next 90 days," said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel.

Drives will come in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch sizes and be based on the Serial-ATA (SATA) II interface. Generally, ultralight notebooks such as the MacBook Air, ThinkPad X300, and the just-introduced HP 2530p use 1.8-inch drives, while corporate customers use the 2.5-inch size in server environments.

Solid-state drives provide much better performance for server-centric IOPS, or input/output operations per second, Intel says.

(Credit: Intel)

Intel says it has put a lot effort into making its solid-state drives reliable. "Right now 95 percent of the flash (memory) consumption is in consumer electronics devices. Storing photos, showing videos. (If) your card fails, you throw it away," Winslow said. Flash card makers have paid little attention to reliability, according to Winslow.

Getting the "intelligent design" right so data is secure is one reason for Intel's delayed entry into the market. "That's why we weren't first to market. It's tough," Winslow said.

Winslow thinks Intel solid-state drives are reliable enough now to have a good shot at replacing high-performance hard-disk drives in large server installations. "We know the data is critical. We know enterprise is going to thrash these drives 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for years," he said. "Bottom line is (enterprise users) can't count on hard drives. You can't predict their failure. By being solid-state there is that predictive ability. You can predict when it's going to wear out, when it's going to fail."

Fusion-io Chief Technology Officer David Flynn sees solid-state drives as a very disruptive force in hard-disk-drive-centric enterprise storage market. "This player is good at video on demand, that guy's good at IOPS (input/output operations per second) for database...It's a highly fractured market," Flynn said. "The differentiation between storage infrastructure will disappear as soon as you can put enough performance and capacity right inside the server."

Flynn echoed Intel's prediction that hard-disk drives will ultimately be relegated to the role that tape drives play today: "Hard disks will become the new tape (drive)...hard disks will store data...(SSDs) will house active data...very big difference...your active data tier will become a silicon tier."

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