14 DAY TRIAL // The mSATA solid state disk form factor gathered quite a bit of steam since its introduction as Intel, together with other manufacturers, have introduced an important number of such compact SSD devices until now, and the list is set to grow even bigger as SuperTalent just announced that is also has plans to join the party.
The mSATA standard was developed by JEDEC to allow for the manufacturing of compact solid state drives that can be easily installed inside ultra-thin and ultra-light notebooks as well as in netbooks.
Such drives look like a regular mini PCI-Express card (such as the WiFi and Bluetooth cards used inside notebooks), but use SATA signaling instead of PCI Express and/or USB, so it can only be used for storage devices.
Performance wise, the standard supports SATA 3Gbps, so the drives can be just as fast as some of their desktop counterparts, as Intel has proved with the mSATA 310 SSD series.
Moving back to SuperTalent's solutions, not so many details are available right now about the drives, except the fact that these will measure a mere 50.80mm x 29.85mm x 4.85mm and that they will supports capacities ranging from 16GB to 256GB.
Judging by the picture provided together with the press release, it would appear that the drives use Micron-built NAND flash chips, but nothing can be certain until the final revision of the SSDs is released.
“As the market moves and new standards emerge for highly integrated SSDs, SuperTalent will be there responding to the needs of our customers,” C.H. Lee, COO of SuperTalent, stated.
A firm release date has not been set until now by SuperTalent, and also the company didn't release any information regarding the pricing of these SSDs.
However, we expect the mSATA drives to be available to both OEM and retail customers, just as is the case with the company's other compact SSD solutions.