This should really push the envelope a bit more further. Now we can have a solid-state hard disk on the mobile phone instead of those microdrive equipped cell phones like the Samsung SGH-i300.

Intel Corporation has announced 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.

SSDs use flash memory to store operating systems and computing data, emulating hard drives. 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 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.

The 2GB and 4GB capacities are large enough to store mobile operating systems, applications and data such as music or photos. It is extendable to 16GB for added storage capacity.

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.

With a 2.5 million hours mean-time between failures (MTBF) rate, this PATA-based chip scale package delivers reliable solid-state performance in an extremely tiny footprint. The Intel Z-P140 is currently sampling with mass production scheduled in the first quarter of 2008. The 4GB version will follow the 2GB product.