Intel announced its latest entry into the solid-state drive market with the Intel Z-P140 PATA Solid-State Drive (SSD), one of the tiniest in the industry aimed at handheld mobile devices. Smaller than a penny and weighing less than a drop of water, these 2 Gigabyte (GB) and 4GB ultra-small devices are fast, low-power and rugged, with the right size, capacity and performance for mobile Internet devices, digital entertainment and embedded products. The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD has an industry standard parallel-ATA (PATA) interface and is optimized to enhance Intel-based computers, and will be an optional part of Intel's Menlow platform for mobile Internet devices debuting in 2008. The Intel Z-P140 PATA SSD offers read speeds of 40 Megabytes-per-second (MB/s) and write speeds of 30 MB/s. Critical to mobile applications, its active power usage is 300mW (milliwatts), and only 1.1mW in sleep mode, which helps to extend a device's battery life.

The Intel Z-P140 is the smallest SSD in its class, making it attractive to designers and manufacturers of mobile and ultra-mobile devices. Comparatively, the Intel Z-P140 is 400 times smaller in volume than a 1.8-inch hard disk drive (HDD), and at .6 grams is 75 times lighter. It is also a much more durable alternative to HDDs.