Intel prepping line of NAND flash drives

Intel has already made its NAND affection pretty clear, but the company's now officially made things official, announcing that it's hopping into the crowded storage market with its own line of solid state offerings. Catchily-dubbed the Z-U130, the drives will come in 1GB, 2GB, 4GB and 8GB varieties to start with, boasting read and write speeds of 28MB per second and 20MB per second, respectively, with a standard USB 2.0/1.1 interface hooking things up. While you won't be able to buy one to do as you please with, Intel certainly doesn't seem to think the drives will be lacking for homes, foreseeing them being used in everything from laptops, desktops, and embedded applications to handheld systems and video game consoles, in each case promising to boost start-up times and reduce power consumption. According to Intel, the 1GB and 2GB drives are already in production, with the 4GB model set to follow in April and the 8GB not expected until December. While it's not getting specific on pricing just yet, Intel says the 4GB drive should be priced below comparable 1.8-inch drives by the second half of this year once production ramps up, with the price expected to come in line with 2.5-inch drives by 2008. Not so clear, unfortunately, is when we might see some drives larger than 8GB.

[Kev50027 @ Mar 12th 2007 12:13PM]

Is it me or is that really not that fast? I get around that speed when transferring large files over USB 2.0 to an external hard drive. That is according to Windows Vista (which now shows the speed at which a file transfer is running)

[NC-17 @ Mar 12th 2007 12:51PM]

These are more about small files and low seek times rather than large files and transfer speeds. Think more OS boot drive than large storage drive.

[JPT1 @ Mar 12th 2007 6:03PM]

Show me a way to boot Vista off of my 4gig SD card and I wont care about replacing my HD with a 4gig flash dive.

[NC-17 @ Mar 12th 2007 6:36PM]

Oh crap what was I thinking this morning. For some reason I thought this was a small SSD rather than a normal USB flash drive. Disregard =\

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Mar 14th 2007 4:40AM]

Part of the Compact Flash specification is that all CF cards have an IDE controller built in, so they are nativly compatable with the ATA protocol that's already in your computer. Lexar now makes a really fast UATA card 40-50MB/s (DMA 66 I believe) and they are the only ones with an UATA CF card.

http://www.lexar.com/digfilm/cf_udma.html
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?hl=en&q=ide%20compact%20flash&btnG=Google+Search&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=N&tab=wf

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Mar 14th 2007 4:40AM]

SD cards currently max out at around 6MB/s and if you want an IDE adapter, they are not quite as common as CF, but they do exist.
http://www.knightdiscounts.com/Computer/detail_idetosd.htm
http://www.knightdiscounts.com/computer.htm
http://www.shentech.com/stemptsdcato.html

[I LOVE THE CAPS LOCK KEY @ Mar 14th 2007 4:41AM]

I don't know if this one is bootable, but the product description leads me to believe it probably is.
http://www.nextdaypc.com/main/products/details.aspx?PID=6441771&rsmainid=ND0130014

Also some motherboards will allow you to boot to a USB memory card reader. So if you can hack windows to install to it, then that may be your best bet.