Intel’s new SSD 310 is eight time small than your notebook’s HDD

Intel has announced a new SSD. Nothing fast that’ll kill SandForce, but something that’s extremely small which Intel hopes to give a fight to Toshiba. Intel’s just announced a new SSD 310 line that offers spectacularly minimal 51mm by 30mm by 5mm dimensions, while retaining X25-class performance (up to 200MBps read and 80MBps write speeds).

To give you an idea of what those measurements mean, the industry-standard 2.5-inch form factor, an already diminutive footprint, is eight times larger than these new-fangled storage chips. 40GB and 80GB variants of the SSD 310 are shipping out to OEMs already and Lenovo has confirmed it plans to roll these into its next refresh of the venerable ThinkPad laptop line.

Prices are set at $99 and $179 (depending on size) when bought in batches of 1,000, though direct sales to end users are predictably off the table for now, as expected. The next SSD might be more expensive, and you’ve been warned.