On top of Atom-based notebooks and other cool hardware, Intel has announced at the IDF the readiness of their own line of solid state disks, making them the latest in a series of companies seeing the market for SSDs open up enough to sell in. Intel's X18-M, a 1.8” unit, and the X25-M, a 2.5” unit, will be available as early as next month. The drives support a slew of features, including some that Intel claims makes their SSDs a more reliable choice for deploying this type of storage.

The units will be offered in 80GB or 160GB capacities, though the latter is not going to be available for some time. If Intel's paper claims are true, they certainly will be a contender for the performance crown, as they supposedly can read at rates of up to 250MB/s.

Though SSD storage is still in its infancy, it is exciting to see all these vendors begin competing with each other when the market didn't even exist just a few years ago.