The thing with high tech is that you always end up using scissors - David Hockney
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Intel new NAND drives go on show tomorrow
INTEL'S NAND Products Group will be showing off its new, catchily-named Z-P140 solid-state drive at the Storage Visions Conference in sinful Las Vegas from tomorrow.
2GB samples of the drives are available now, with production due this quarter. The Z-P140 has a parallel-ATA (PATA) interface and is optimised for Intel platforms. These include the Menlow platform for UMPCs and what Intel calls MIDs, for mobile internet devices, with the platform scheduled to arrive in the first half of this new, bright-eyed year. Demonstrated in prototype form last April at IDF in Beijing, Menlow also features the Silverthorne low-power processor and Poulsbo chipset.
At the Vegas conference, Intel will show off sample (read “probably not
working”) devices featuring the Z-P140 drive, as well as eval boards. Also on
show will be previews of SATA solid-state drives that
should drive up performance.
Now then, if Apple, as world+dog expects, announces a subnotebook at Macworld on 14 January, do you think it might have Silverthorne and the Intel Flash drives inside? µ
Tags: Apple
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Why not use existing commodity flash? Because existing commodity flash is far far slower. 

2GB because it's developed for an ultra mobile low power state platform. By the middle of the year this will scale to 16GB. 

PATA, because PATA is enough and the interface tec is cheap. Very few SATA devices support burst speeds beyond what PATA interfaces could handle anyway. 

The Z-P140 supports sustained burst rates comparable to PATA and SATA magnetic storage media found in mainstream mobile PC's. yet operating on a fraction of the power and having *no* mechanical latency.

It's a significant development, and much faster than existing consumer flash subsystems. 

Bah kneejerk-reaction humbug! :P
2GB? and a PATA interface? Where has Intel been keeping this team, under a rock? You'd think Intel with all that marketing talent would have figured out what is required to at least be competitive.

Bah, humbug!

Can anyone explain why you'd want a 2gig solid state hard drive? 

Why not just use flash memory in these devices?