Intel has announced plans to enter the market for solid-state disks. The chipmaker hopes to increase server performance with the flash-based storage devices.

At the IDF, Intel announced plans to integrate SSDs in servers. According to Intel’s vice-president Pat Gelsinger, the choice is based not so much on the storage capacity but on the flash-based medium’s high I/O rates as well as the lower energy consumption compared to classic spindle-based magnetic media.

Initially, an entry-level model with a capacity of 32GB is planned for 2008. “Of course, the cost per bit are higher,” says Gelsinger. However, these products are aimed at customers whose primary concern is performance and who don’t fill their hard-drive based storage solutions to capacity. Gelsinger claimed that often database environments only made use of numerous hard drives in order to reach a higher bandwidth – while only utilizing 10 to 20 percent of the capacity. Still Intel is confident that SSD capacity will also increase quickly. The company expects to see affordable 64 GB and 128 GB models very soon.

For now, SSDs with a storage capacity typical for a server environment are prohibitively expensive, and will remain so for the short term. Just last week Bitmicro showed off an SSD with a capacity of 416 GB with a price tag somewhere around the € 20,000 mark.