Las Vegas (NV) - Solid state drives may be the new black at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. Dozens of companies are showcasing their newest, fastest and largest flash drives and Intel is no exception. But while other companies are betting everything on removable drives, Intel is taking a different route by offering up small, fingertip-sized devices that can be soldered directly to the motherboard.

Intel’s Z-P140 drives will be available in both 2 and 4 GB capacities

We spoke with Intel’s Don Larson who is the company’s Product Line Manager of the NAND Products Group at the annual Storage Visions Conference which is one of the several pre-CES show events that TG Daily will attend. Larson pulled out wafer-thin chips from his pockets - chips that contain both a PATA/IDE controller and 2 and 4 GB of flash memory.

Pics of Intel’s SSDs and Classmate PC ...

These chips, dubbed the Z-P140 SSD drives, are soldered onto the motherboards of small laptops and ultra-mobile computers and the controller can manage up to four flash chips for a total 16 GB of on-board flash memory.

The drives are an optional part of Intel’s proposed Menlow platform and promise lower power consumption and faster speeds than regular hard drives. Intel showed us some mockups of ultra-mobile pcs that would use the drives. There was also a working Classmate PC that uses similar solid state drive technology. Larson told us that the Z-P140s could conceivably be used in a regular laptop, but said notebook owners might want something a bit beefier.

Larson then pulled out a shiny, palm-sized drive that he claimed would have 10 to 100 times the performance of current hard drives. While he did say the drives would have a SATA interface, Larson couldn’t tell us anything about proposed capacities.

The 2 GB SSDs should be available this quarter while the 4 GB versions will come next quarter.