14 DAY TRIAL // Apacer is getting ready to start sending out members of a certain new collection of solid state drives: mSATA A1, equipped with the newest SATA technology.
Normally, we wouldn't expect an industrial solid-state drive, or industrial product of other sort, to be marketed as an ultrabook component.
After all, ultrabooks are consumer products and put more stock on portability and convenience than on advanced endurance and security.
As such, Apacer's mSATA A1 will be an odd breed, one that only expensive ultrathin laptops will afford to include.
The first hint is the type of NAND Flash chips. Apacer chose SLC (single-level cell) instead of the more affordable MLC (multi-level cell).
Secondly, the storage devices are particularly thin, about as much as a single PCB panel. That is to say much smaller than an HDD or even common SSDs.
A third asset is the plug-in DDR2 cache memory. Together with ONFi 2.2 DDR NAND, it allows for 470 MB/s read speed, 200 MB/s write speed and up to 50,000 random performance IOPS.
These might not seem like the best possible specs, but they are still noteworthy considering that the regular SATA 6.0 Gbps SSDs with 500+ MB/s ratings don't usually reach that high in real life.
Moving on, Apacer's products support Intel Rapid Start and Intel Smart Response technologies (for fast boot and SSD caching, respectively).
As for capacity, the company will have 128 GB or smaller models on hand starting in the third quarter (July-September), but only in sample shipments. Ultrabooks makers will have to contact Apacer if they want to get one and test the Global Wear Leveling, 40 bit/1k Byte Error Correcting Code, intelligent power failure recovery and the other technologies built into them.
Finally, for those more budget-conscious, Apacer will provide MLC-based mSATA A1-M SSDs, in 32GB to 256GB capacities.