Santa Clara (CA) – Solid state disk (SSD) drives have been around for some time now and if you are somewhat interested in the hardware that is inside your PC, then there is a good chance you have thought about purchasing a flash-based solid state disk drive for your next notebook or desktop PC. As we are getting closer to 2009, considered to be the year when SSDs are going mainstream, Intel is joining the bandwagon with its first “mainstream” SSD, that may not be so mainstream in terms of price. But that really depends on how you define a mainstream customer. So here is my question, are you a mainstream SSD customer, as defined by Intel?

Intel’s SSDs, first unveiled two weeks ago at the company’s fall IDF , are now officially available. They come in 1.8” and 2.5” form factors, called X18-M and X25-M, respectively. Both drives are based on an SATA-II interface, built with multi-level-cell (MLC) technology and ship with a rather odd SSD capacity of 80 GB. The M” in the product names hints to the fact that these are “mainstream” products as opposed to “Extreme” versions that will become available later this year. Both models are rated at a read speed of 250 MB/s and a write speed of 70 MB/s. The power consumption is 0.15 watts under load and 0.06 watts in idle state; the reliability is rated at 1.2 million hours MTBF.

160 GB models will begin sampling in the fourth quarter.
 
Let’s talk about the price. Mainstream hard drives are typically priced well below $100 and at less than $60 in the OEM segment. It would be silly to expect Intel to offer these SSDs even close to that price, but their suggested price of $595 (for up to 1000 unit quantities) may be a bit high to call these drives “mainstream”.

If you are out for a bargain you can currently snap up (much slower) SATA II with 32 GB capacities for just over $100, while 64 GB versions currently start in between $200-$250 and 128 GB models have moved into the $450 range. A quick market scan reveals that Intel’s new SSDs are not cheap, especially if industry sources tell us that manufacturers such as Samsung may be releasing 256 GB drives this year for “substantially” less than $1000.

What do you think? Have SSDs arrived in the mainstream already? How much capacity would  you expect from your first SSD and what would you be willing to pay for it? Let us know by writing a comment below.