Affordable is the word Intel wants associated with this drive, but the price per gigabyte is the same as that of its higher-capacity consumer SSDs. The new drive simply offers less storage space and lower performance for a lower price. But industry analysts said the trend of offering lower-capacity SSDs for around $100 may spur adoption of nonvolatile memory in what has been a somewhat flat market over the past year.

"I think consumers will consider this product. Equipment manufacturers definitely will," said Michael Yang, a flash memory analyst at iSuppli Corp.

The X25-V is a 2.5-in., 40GB SSD that is being marketed by Intel as an "entry-level" drive for use in netbooks and as a secondary drive in dual-drive desktop PCs, where it would serve as a "boot drive" to offer users faster boot times and faster access to key applications.

Last week, its own "affordable" SSD, the Onyx SATA II drive.

The Onyx is a 32GB SSD that, like other consumer-grade flash drives, is based on multilevel cell (MLC) NAND and offers 125MB/sec. sequential read and 70MB/sec. sequential write speeds.