There's an old cliche' that certainly applies to commodity semiconductor and electronics technology, as well as many other competitive arenas; "go big or go home". If you look at major semiconductor manufacturers, like Intel, AMD, Samsung and NVIDIA, you'll notice that they generally do not enter a new market lightly. In addition, they almost never partially resource a new market penetration effort. Timing is definitely key but it usually doesn't pay off to tread lightly when it's time to execute. It's simply a question of doing the business case analysis, justifying the ROI and then placing your bets. Go big or go home. It's all-in or sit on the sidelines and watch. And you know, when Intel decides they want in, the stack of chips they're playing with isn't the kind you find at the cheap tables.With that in mind, let's consider the future of the Solid State Disk market and where it's going. We've said it before, the days of rotational media are numbered. Though SSDs and spinning drives will likely coexist for some time, traditional hard drive technology will eventually go the way of the dinosaur. SSDs have no moving parts to wear out, they consume much less power, produce very little heat and their performance will continue to improve over time, with the kind of scaling that comes along with a semiconductor performance evolution curve. Though the migration will be gradual, starting first at the consumer level, then moving into the industrial and enterprise space, it's a matter of time before the world literally goes solid state for its storage. In the short term, especially at the consumer level, the SSD market is expected to have explosive growth over the next year or so, some analysts predicting well in excess of 100% annually.

And so it goes without saying, Solid State Storage is a safe bet. Today Intel just bellied up to the table and dropped their chips down on the SSD market, and in typical Intel fashion, they're going in big. The following is a full evaluation of Intel's new consumer-targeted X25-M Solid State Drive.