Intel Corp. on Wednesday announced its new 310-series solid-state drives (SSDs) that boast small sizes (about 1.8"), high performance and modest price. The drives are designed for thin notebooks, innovative single-drive tablets and low-power, rugged embedded industrial or military applications.

Intel 310-series SSDs code-named Soda Creek measure 51mm-by-30mm, are only 5mm thick and weigh less than 10 grams. The drives deliver up to 200MB/s sustained read speed as well as up to 70MB/s sustained write speed. The manufacturer declares up to 35K read an up to 6.6K write input/output operations per second (IOPS). The new solid-state drives are available in 40GB as well as 80GB capacities and are based on 34nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory.

“The Intel SSD 310 Series is the first in a wave of SSD products we will introduce throughout the next year. With this introduction, Intel is offering full SSD performance in a compact, ultra-small form factorm," said Tom Rampone, Intel vice president and general manager of Intel’s NAND Solutions Group.

The Intel SSD 310 supports Serial ATA signals over a PCI Express (PCIe) mini-connector for on-board, compact storage in single-drive netbooks, tablets or handheld devices. The compact size also enables dual drive all-in-ones, notebooks or small-form-factor (SFF) desktops to help accelerate boot time and access to frequently used applications or files.

“The Intel SSD 310 series will allow us to provide the advantages of a full-performance Intel SSD paired with the storage of a hard disk drive in a small, dual-drive system. We have offered Intel SSD solutions for our highly innovative Lenovo ThinkPad laptops for some time, and now we’re looking forward to incorporating this new solution across our ThinkPad line," said Tom Butler, director of ThinkPad product marketing at Lenovo.

Already shipping to customers, the Intel SSD 310 is priced at $99 for the 40GB capacity and $179 for the 80GB version, both in 1000-unit quantities.

Tags: Intel, SSD, mSATA, 34nm, Flash, NAND