Intel to launch 160GB SSD this year

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.

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.