Intel Corporation announced its latest entry into the solid-state drive market with the Intel Z-P140 PATA Solid-State Drive (SSD) aimed at handheld mobile devices.

SSDs use flash memory to store operating systems and computing data, emulating hard drives. The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD has an industry standard parallel-ATA (PATA) interface and is optimised to enhance Intel-based computers, and will be an optional part of Intel's Menlow platform for mobile Internet devices debuting in 2008.

The Intel Z-P140 has a 1.8-inch hard disk drive (HDD), and at .6 grams is 75 times lighter. The 2GB and 4GB capacities store mobile operating systems, applications and data such as music or photos. It is extendable to 16GB for added storage capacity.

"Our mission is to provide world-class non-volatile SSD and caching solutions that are designed, optimised and validated to enhance Intel Architecture-based computing platforms," said Pete Hazen, director of marketing for Intel's NAND Products Group. "Our customers are finding the Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD to be the right size, fit and performance for their pocketable designs. This is Intel's latest offering as we continue to expand our product line of reliable, feature-rich and high-performing SSDs."

The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD offers read speeds of 40 Megabytes-per-second (MB/s) and write speeds of 30 MB/s. Its active power usage is 300mW (milliwatts), and 1.1mW in sleep mode.