Intel unveiled its first flash memory drives for personal computers and servers Tuesday, boasting the products would eliminate worries about performance and power savings when they begin shipping in 30 days.

No pricing was available during a presentation at the Intel Developers Forum in San Francisco.

The chip maker said its NAND flash drives (which store data even when the power is turned off) access data more quickly in a PC while proving more rugged than today's hard disk drives.

Solid-state flash drives with no moving parts are expected to take a growing share of the market from traditional disk drives. But their higher price may make that transition slower than some vendors predict.

The first of the Intel products, the X18-M for notebooks and desktops, will store 80 GB of data and ship within 30 days. The X25-M will follow in the first quarter of 2009 and hold 160 GB.

"With Intel's 80 GB SSD we are seeing over 500% performance improvement over previous generations of SSDs that we used in our notebooks [HP sourced previous SSDs from Samsung and Sandisk]. Actually, we haven't seen any performance improvement of these old SSDs over traditional hard disk drives", confirmed Sarah Bussel, Product marketing manager of business notebooks at HP's Personal Systems Group.

A server product, the X25-E, will ship in 90 days. A second server product is anticipated in the first quarter.

Intel's flash drives for PCs will allow a spyware scan and the installation of Microsoft's Office software to take place 40% faster, said Kishore Rao, product line manager.

"We have a product that is better by design," he said.

Indeed, "not all (solid-state drives) are truly equal," said Walter Fry, a senior notebook platform architect at Hewlett-Packard. "We have found they do vary."

In recent months, some computer experts have begun doubting that flash drives would live up the performance and power-savings claims of some advocates.

By Mark Boslet, Editor at large.