WITH MOST OF THE market looking onwards towards the newly-released platforms like Intel’s Atom, Nvidia’s Tegra and Via’s Nano – details on supporting hardware have been scarce.

Scarce, that is, until Intel announced its Z-P230 PATA drives, for the UMPC and MID market (although theoretically it could also target CE). PATA as it may be, the Z-P230 comes in 4GB and 8GB flavours (with 16GB to follow by the end of the year) and pricing will be an amazingly low $25 ($6.25 per Gig) and $45 ($5.625 per Gig), respectively. Adding as little as 10g to the device that will support it (basically anything with a PATA interface and 1.8-inch connector), the Z-P230 draws just 1.65mW at idle (if there is such a thing in SSD) and 314mW whilst active.

Performance may be nothing special, or just enough to run some whacky OS and help get you through a work day, with a 35MB/s sustained sequential read and 7MB/s sustained sequential write speed. That would be enough, though, to read through hi-def 1920x1080 60fps video...

Oh. MTBF is 1 million hours – with an average three-year life expectancy.

This really does show just how much faith (and how many Benjamins) Intel is willing to throw at the UMPC and MID market, and just how far they are willing to go. Intel could be making a killing by charging a premium for any sort of SSD they put out the door, but right now they’ve gone into “enabler” mode whereby money is knowingly lost and chalked up to making a platform (Atom) viable.

We wouldn’t be shocked if these things eventually made Via Nanobooks, Tegra-based MIDs viable too. That kind of investment has a nasty habit of biting you in the butt-ocks, you know? µ

L’Inq

Z-P230