Today Intel, a world leader in silicon innovation, took their first crack at a new product line of solid state drives based on Nand flash memory.

The new Z-U130 Value Solid-State Drive is intended to be used in the place of traditional hard drives offering a more cost-effective and high-performance storage solution. The Nand flash-based drives can offer quicker boot times and faster data access while using less power in systems such as PC’s, routers and gaming devices. Aside from just being able to improve boot times and the ability to find and read data faster, the flash memory based drives would also most likely last longer than a traditional hard drive since there are no moving parts involved.

“Solid state drive technology offers many benefits over traditional hard disk drives including improved performance and reliability,” said Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager of Intel’s NAND Products Group. “The Intel solid state drive technology provides robust performance, while offering Intel’s industry leading quality, validation and reliability for a wide variety of embedded applications.”

Of course there are some disadvantages to the solid state drives in that hard drives have been known to have a longer endurance for many read/write cycles and can write data faster. Also, currently the price of a magnetic-based hard drive is quite a bit less in larger capacities than a solid-state drive would be.

For those of you looking to have a completely quiet PC, this solid-state drive brings you another step closer. The new solid state drives will come in 1GB, 2GB, 4Gb and 8GB capacities with a read time of 28 MB per second and a write time of 20 MB per second.