Beginning Monday, Intel’s shipment of 160-GB drive in 2.5-inch SSDs (X25-M) has got underway. Next month, the company will begin the shipment of its 160 GB, 1.8-inch SSDs (X18-M). Solid-state drives such as these - an offering for mini-books and exceptionally-light laptops - are used basically for Web browsing and e-mails.

The shipment of the 80-GB versions of these two Intel SSDs began in September.

Moreover, earlier in August, at the company’s Developer Forum, it announced its 32GB Intel X25-E Extreme SATA, for workstations, storage and enterprise servers. Available in 32 GB and 64 GB capacities, the life expectancy of these SATA drives is 2 million hours of MTBF.

So far as the specifications of the X25-M and X18-M are concerned, these drives – at present, costing $945 in quantities of under 1,000 - are based on Intel’s multilevel cell memory.

According to Intel, the technology, a differentiating factor between Intel SSDs and competitors, enables up to 32 concurrent operations for faster performance owing to highly parallel 10x NAND flash channels and “native command queuing.”

Both X25-M and X18-M are available with SATA interfaces of 1.5 Gbps and 3.0 Gbps respectively. The read speeds of the drives go up to 250 MBps, and write speeds up to 70 MBps.

With their life expectancy of 1.2 million hours of mean time before failure, and power consumption 150 milliwatts during PC workload and 0.06 of a watt at idle, the mainstream drives from Intel have yet to match up to Toshiba with its capacities of 64-GB, 128-GB, and 256-GB in the 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch SSDs.