14 DAY TRIAL // With all the different sorts of USB-compatible flash drives, SSDs and HDDs that have been cropping up over the past few months, consumers might have been misled into thinking that there is little room for innovation in this area, at least in terms of design. ATP Electronics, however, seems ready to prove this assumption wrong, now that it has completed the development of its internal USB SSDs.
At first glance, the idea of an internal USB SSD may sound queer, mostly because USB is generally used to communicate with external storage devices such as flash drives and portable, large-capacity units (whether they are hard drives or solid state drives). ATP, on the other hand, decided to create a secure, small form-factor device that stands out by not standing out at all, in the literal sense of the word.
Consumers versed in hardware might know that every motherboard, in addition to the USB ports on the back panel, features a number of USB pin heads as well. These heads usually end up connected to the USB ports on the I/O panels of cases. In some situations, however, some of those ports remain unused. The newest ATP SSD measures 28.2 (L) x 15.3 (W) x 6.2 (H) mm and is meant to be directly plugged into those USB pin heads, thus adding a small storage capacity bonus (between 512MB and 4GB).
The SSDs are ESD (Electro-Static Discharge), vibration-, water- and dust-proof and are made up of single-level cell (SLC) NAND Flash chips. They have a maximum transfer rate of 30MB/s. Furthermore, they make use of the SIP (System In Package) technology, which encapsulates all components to increase endurance. This enables an MTBF of five million hours. Unfortunately, pricing is still a mystery and there is no indication of where and when the drives will start selling.