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Intel say: 'Measuring 51mm-by-30mm and only 5mm thick, the Intel SSD 310 is a fast, ultra-compact SSD that brings flexibility, ruggedness and scalability to innovative form factors and devices.'
Its dimensions a
re length 51mm and width 30 mm. Side-on it is really slender at 5 mm, as the image above shows.
'It can enable highly responsive dual-drive notebooks, innovative single-drive tablets and low-power, rugged embedded industrial or military applications.'
'When paired with a high-capacity hard disk drive (HDD) in a dual-drive system, the Intel SSD 310 can improve overall PC system performance by up to 60 percent.'
One early application is in the ARMOR rugged tablet PC. Due to its rugged design, the Intel SSD 310 Series has been chosen by DRS Technologies for a new ARMOR communications tablet PC. The ARMOR mobile and field unit tablet PC is certified by DRS to work in extreme temperatures and withstand shock, vibration and drops, delivering up to nine hours of operating time.
'The Intel SSD 310 Series is the first in a wave of SSD products we will introduce throughout the next year,' said Tom Rampone, Intel vice president and general manager of Intel's NAND Solutions Group. 'With this introduction, Intel is offering full SSD performance in a compact, ultra-small form factor.'
For a size comparison, this article in The Register has a side-by-side picture of these two drives which really shows how tiny the Intel SSD 310 drive is versus a 2.5-inch hard drive.
I wonder what the longevity of such SSD drives will prove to be, in different operating environments and with different usage patterns (especially, as far as the ratio of reads to writes is concerned).
And not to forget that quite a few months ago Seagate Technology introduced its unique Momentus XT Solid State Hybrid Drive which, they say, aims to give you SSD-like performance for just above the significantly lower price of non-hybrid HDD drives. Watch this Momentus XT speed test video (June 2010) to see what I mean (and there are lots of other reviews and speed tests available, as per this search).
Ah, the beauty of healthy competition!
