March 19, 2007- Intel Corp. has announced its entry into solid state drives with the Intel Z-U130 value solid-state drive that is based on NAND flash memory with industry standard USB interfaces, to be used in a wide variety of computing and embedded platforms.

“Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability,” said Randy Wilhelm, VP and GM of Intel’s NAND Products Group.

The Intel Z-U130 is the company’s first solution in the Intel value solid state drive family that will offer different industry standard interfaces and densities. The product comes in 1 Gigabyte (GB), 2GB, 4GB and 8GB densities. With fast reads of 28 megabytes (MB) per second and write speeds of 20 MB per second, this higher performing solid state drive is a faster storage alternative that speeds through common PC or embedded application operations such as locating boot code, operating systems and commonly accessed libraries.

The drives will also be used in a variety of Intel-based computing platforms, such as servers, emerging market notebooks and low-cost, fully featured PCs. In addition, it will be used in Intel embedded solutions for routers and point of sale terminals.

The product can be easily integrated into original design manufacturers’ designs because of its USB 2.0 and 1.1 compliant interfaces, 2×5 USB connector and standard single-level cell NAND in thin small outline package (TSOP) devices. The company is also considering next-generation products that could incorporate cost-effective multi-level cell technology.