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The drives will be available in 2.5in and 1.8in SATA formats. 80GB capacities are planned during September, with 160GB parts promised by the end of the year.

Technical demonstrations at the Intel Developer Forum showed the 80GB model achieving a sustained 212MB/s read speed. For comparison, a RAID array of two Western Digital 10,000 RPM Velociraptor hard disks on otherwise identical hardware averaged around 180MB/s.

Seek time was measured at 0.1ms, with power consumption of around 0.15W when the drive was active, falling to 0.06W when idle. That makes the new drives around a hundred times as responsive as a conventional drive for random access, while consuming around a hundredth of the power while idle.

Traditionally, SSD units have been expensive, and Intel has yet to announce prices for its new drives. It's already found two customers, though: both HP and Lenovo have signed up to use the drives in their notebooks.