The company has announced that is has developed a SSD (solid state drive) that can easily replace an average HDD.

The days of the good-old hard disk might be over, as Intel announced its intention to enter the high capacity solid state storage market with a 160GB solid state drive (SSD) in the next three months. Currently the most storage one can get from a solid-state drive is 128GB.

The hard-disk is the slowest part of any modern computer as it also represents the only non-peripheral computer hardware component that still uses mechanical parts. Despite the fact that hard-disk technology has improved over time, and storage capacity is growing at an increasing rate, the basic principles of any hard-drive hasn’t changed at all. This translates to a much lower transfer speed for the hard-disk than any other main computer components.

Fortunately, the SSD technology has come to the rescue and promises great improvements in digital data storage as it’s faster, totally silent and uses less power that HDDs. As is doesn’t have any moving parts, being basically just an array of flash memory chips, an SSD has faster seek-rates and although it has lower transfer speeds, it still beats any hard-disk in overall performance.

With that in mind, you are probably wondering why hasn’t everybody adopted the new technology and sent the old hard-disk to the museum. Well, the catch is that if you can easily buy a 500GB hard-drive for a bit more than $100 you have to be prepared to pay $1500 or more for a 128GB SDD.