14 DAY TRIAL // The new technology from HGST will no doubt keep people talking and gushing for weeks, but in the meantime the solid state drive market has to advance at the same pace it's always been. Super Talent has just made its latest contribution.
Said contribution takes the form of the new mSATA SSD line. The company did not even bother giving it some fancy name or other. Instead, it relies on the specs and price to get it to sell.
The price is not actually known, but it is bound to be quite low, all things considered. After all, the storage capacity and transfer speeds possible on the newcomers are quite low.
Well, low among solid state drives anyway. Although a case could be made that the mSATA SSD line shouldn't even be classified as SSDs at all.
Still, the mSATA form factor is, nonetheless, an SSD form factor, even though Super Talent did take the whole concept of compactness to an extreme this time.
Normally, mSATA drives are a bit (or a lot) longer than this MO-300B form factor standard, but the outfit wanted them to be compatible with all laptops and even some tablets.
It did result in the storage space being no greater than that of a memory card series (8 GB to 64 GB), but the read/write speeds are well beyond most of theirs: 300 MB/s read and 100 MB/s write.
Class 10 cards can read faster, sure enough, but write speeds seldom go over 30-40 MB/s. The spec itself only demands 10 MB/s. So yes, the new mini SJ1 Super Talent mSATA SSDs have all they need to find buyers among the ranks of laptop providers.
The rest of Super Talent's mSATA SSD lineup consists of 16 GB to 128 GB units with 160 MB/s read and 100 MB/s writing speed.
You probably won't find this thing up for sale anywhere, in either capacity, which must be part of the reason why no price was included in the press release. Even if the thing does emerge on retailer websites, Super Talent is bound to shuffle it more between its warehouses and makers of pre-configured laptops.
That is, after all, what they are made for: notebook storage. Even at the lower performance compared to full, high-capacity SATA III SSDs, the SJ1 are quite fast, fast enough to play the role of cache drives, to hold the OS and frequently used files while an HDD stores the bulk of the information.