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I came across a few intereting bits of SSD news today. Intel is apparently phasing out its Z-P230 line of solid state disks for netbooks. the company first launched these 4 through 16GB SSDs in June, 2008. The company plans to stop shipping them on June 4th, 2009. The company is instead focusing on higher end 80GB and 160GB solid state disks which sell for significantly more than the $15 through $45 that Intel was charging for the Z-P230 series.

While many of the earliest netbooks had low capacity, relatively slow solid state disks, the tide has turned and today most mini-laptops have hard drives with capacities up to 160GB. So it’s not surprising to see Intel get out of the cheap SSD market and focus on products with higher profit margin. But it’s possible that we could start to see netbooks with higher quality SSDs in the future as well. There are already a number of third party companies making SSD upgrade kits for netbooks. Jkkmobile posted a video demonstrating how to add a 128GB RunCore SSD to a Dell Inspiron Mini today.

And memory maker Crucial is getting on the action with a new 64GB SSD. The Crucial N125 SSD is designed for netbooks with a PCIe slot. Reg Hardware reports that the N125  isn’t exactly a speed demon, but it will provide quite a bit of extra storage space for netbooks that ship with tiny SSDs like the Asus Eee PC 900.