Intel Denies Rumors of SSD Market Exit
Intel will stick to flash memory businesses, contrary to recent reports. We spoke to Intel contacts several days ago and they indicated that the company has no intentions of leaving the flash memory business despite reports suggesting otherwise. Intel recently announced several initiatives to enter the solid state drive (SSD) business and even made a point that it would help mass produce SSD drives to help bring prices down.
The company also invests heavily with other memory partners, such as Micron, on joint ventures in the flash business. Although in recent years, the memory business has suffered some, Intel continually shows strong investment in this sector.
Intel recently demonstrated systems running with its own SSD drives at Computex this year. What we witnessed was both speedy read and write performance, and quiet operation. The drives themselves were running relatively cool to the touch.
In terms of competition, Intel has a number of very competitive companies it’s up against. Seagate, Samsung and several other companies are vying for the SSD market. Samsung for example recently announced SATA 2 SSD drives that delivery very fast performance. According to Samsung, its new drives deliver a read speed of 200MB/sec. and 160MB/sec. write speeds — far ahead of the competition. While Intel has not shared with us yet details about the performance of its new SSD drives, Intel did indicate that due to high quality controllers and optimizations, customers can expect competitive performance. Competitive is a relative term at this point until we’re able to confirm numbers.
Intel is set to introduce drives with capacities of 160GB and 200GB. Samsung’s SATA 2 SSD drive will ship at 256GB with other offerings on the side.

it's going to take at least 6-12 months until new drives comes out and prices come down
Once solid state storage becomes popular, I can 100% guarantee that virii, trojans and other malware will be able to infect your PC, while it is otherwise OFF.
If you don't hear disk access, or see the blinking light, how would you know if your data is being accessed, or if it isn't?
http://www.fusionio.com/PDFs/FusionDataSheet.pdf
And their just a startup, not a multi-billion dollar corporation with almost 40 years in the market.
I think the next 5 years is going to really reshape computing a lot more than the last 10. CPU parallelism, optical interconnects, ray tracing, and finally solid state storage is going to have more effect that people realize. Mix that in with all the advances in the biotech industry, and it's going to be an interesting time to be a carbon based meatsack.
PS: Thats not the only thing stopping people from taking control over your computer. SSDs are no different than conventional disks in this manner, the system is either on or off. You cant start up a system with the processor powered down, no matter what the hard drive is based on. A more realistic threat, is flash memory on the motherboard and processes having access to CPU ring -1, so that even virus software wont know the virus is running your whole system as a VM. It's time to trash your motherboard then, because you could never really know if your own Hypervisor was really at -1 or if something else was just emulating it.