Intel has confirmed plans to launch solid state drives (SSD) this week at the Intel Developer Forum in Shanghai, and claimed SSDs will beat their hard disk drive equivalents on failure rates.
According to Dadi Perlmutter, Intel's mobility group GM, the Sata drives will debut in two form factors, 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors later this year, in two sizes: 32GB and 160GB.
"We've been spending 20 to 30 years improving processing performances using silicon technology but the I/O remains limited in performance," said Perlmutter, prompting the arrival of the SSDs later this year.
The move will pit Intel against the likes of Toshiba and Samsung, also planning SSD launches in the coming months.
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A recent study by Avian Securities reported a failure rate among laptops using SSDs of between 20 and 30 percent. "There is an order of magnitude higher in failure rates," Avi Cohen, managing partner of Avian Securities, said at the time.
Perlmutter could not immediately put a figure on the chipmaker's SSDs failure rate but said it's equivalent to that of a "state-of-the-art hard disk".
The company also yesterday added a mobile device management offering under the brand Intel Anti-Theft Technology, set to launch in Q4 this year.
Users have become more interested in locking down their laptops over the past two years: "They are more and more concerned about protecting data on their notebook — this is something we have not seen earlier," said Perlmutter.
Talkback
Why don't processors add another bus: so that the operating system, current configuration and main (most used) apps. can reside in FLASH.
This would give a step increase in speed, plus, instant on.
Just a thought:
Currently with magnetic media (conventional hard drives) even overwriting data still leaves a trace which can be recovered by police forensic techniques.
I don't think this would be the case with SSDs. Any overwritten data would be obliterated.
Any technology could be used for criminal advantage. This technology would be make police evidence collection that bit harder.
Lee, i don't think that's a major issue, there are always new technologies that the police can rely on, for example right now they can trace all your online activities without your knowledge.
In terms of hiding the evidence, even now if the criminal is smart enough they can overwrite the right disk clusters.