Intel has unveiled tiny solid-state storage drives for its upcoming platform for ultramobile PCs, which will go into mass production in the beginning of 2008.  These would be provided as an optional module to manufacturers to embed on motherboards that are made for the Menlow platform, which is designed for ultramobile PCs such as handheld devices. 

Unlike most SSD drives on the market today, this Z-P140 SSD chip is 400 times smaller than a 1.8" hard drive and weighs just 0.6 grams.  It will initially be available in capacities of 2GB and 4GB and up to four SSDs can be connected to a standard PATA interface to give up to a combined capacity of 16GB.  Storage modules of up to 64GB are expected to become available in two years.  The SSDs feature read and write transfer rates of 40MB/sec and 30MB/sec respectively. 

It will be interesting to see if such embedded SSDs will be later put into use on laptops.  However, even if an expansion module is provided to allow one to add more storage, one drawback with an embedded SSD is that if a laptop using one has a major hardware failure that prevents any way of accessing the embedded SSD, it will not be possible (or at least very difficult) to take out the SSD and pop it in an external HDD case to retrieve the data on another computer.