The mini-SATA en route Posted on 22/09/2009 at 16:40 by Marc
- source: SATA-IO
SATA-IO has announced a new standard known as mSATA (for mini SATA) designed with netbooks and laptops in mind. mSATA will provide compact connection for SSDs and other small-form factor devices. While SATA III is starting to appear, mSATA currently only gives SATA II speeds, namely 3 Gbit/s. This interface should moreover harmonise design for small hard drives.
Toshiba have taken advantage of this announcement to come onto the market with an SSD range that uses the mSATA interface. It is called the SG2 range and offers drives of 30 and 60 GB that measure just 50x30x4.45 mm. 32 nm MLC memory is used and the MTBF has been announced at 1 million usage hours. The speeds announced are good: 70 MB/s writes and 180 MB/s reads, already a jump forward from PATA. These drives will be in production as of October 2009.
