Intel’s got some pretty sexy and expensive SSD drives you know those oh so awesome instant access hard drives with near instant seek times. It’s always quite expensive for everything from 40-250gb versions. This limits them to pretty much only uber notebooks and the best of the best desktops that speed freaks demand.
Well intel’s targeting a smaller subset of machines at a MUCH lower price bracket. Namely the NetTop market those tiny 300-400$ laptops that are all the fad these days. How will they target these small PC’s that don’t even have full sized hard drives to begin with? Well the plan is for 3 models of SSD drives but in much smaller sizes 4gb and 8gb to start with as well as an eventual 16gb model to follow later this year in Q4. The drives are tiny, 1/4th the size of the already small 1.8″ hard drives and will have the standard SSD goodness of access and seek times as well as the low power usage which will provide a nice power longevity boost to the nettops that many owners will appreciate.
While the smaller sizes will mean they will be cheap to come by in comparison to their big brothers but, the question really is how much of a premium the small droplets of SSD goodness will add on to the standard nettop devices when you go looking for the best buy at somewhere like buy.com or other retailers when they finally ship.
Source: Engadget
