Samsung mSATA Solid State Drive Serve Ultra-Thin Notebooks

Samsung is living up to its reputation as provider of NAND Flash storage solutions with the new series of solid state drives, one that uses the mSATA connectivity interface.

By their nature, they should prove most appealing to builders of Ultrabooks.

Since they are supposed to be super-thin mobile personal computers, they don't really have much choice but to integrate NAND Flash memory.

After all, HDDs aren't precisely thin enough to work, though DSI did propose 5mm models.

Samsung's new drives have capacities of 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB and there is also a 32 GB model for caching.

They are designed with 20nm chips and will be part of the PM830 series, the same line that was launched earlier this year.

They weigh eight grams each, measure 50.95 x 30 x 3.8 mm (2 x 1.18 x 0.14 inches) and have not exactly been given official prices.

Then again, since they aren't supposed to be bought standalone, but as part of thin laptops, that is not any reason for surprise.

“Samsung’s compact mSATA SSDs will provide performance of the highest quality in helping to deliver the advanced ultra-slim PCs that consumers have been wanting,” said Myungho Kim, vice president of memory marketing, Device Solutions, Samsung Electronics.

“Samsung plans to continue providing timely delivery of advanced SSD solutions, while preserving its leadership position in the SSD market for notebook PCs.”

Samsung's mSATA SSDs come with the toggle DDR interface and SATA 6.0 Gbps controllers, enabling read and write speeds of 500 MB/s and 260 MB/s, respectively.

Finally, Samsung threw in 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protection, safeguarding the data in case the PC is stolen or lost.

CES 2011 will be when 30 to 50 ultrabooks get formally introduced, so Samsung's latest creations may very well end up in some of them.