They reach transmission rates of up to 530 MB/s and write at 440 MB/s

Mar 25, 2014 13:30 GMT  ·  By

Team Group has launched a series of solid-state drives that don't reach the highest performance peaks of certain 2.5-inch or even mSATA high-end storage devices, but they come close enough that it doesn't really matter.

Called mSATA MP1, the newcomers are, obviously, designed in the mSATA form factor, the one where the NAND Flash chips are fused to a PCB and don't have any outer covering.

It's the optimum form factor for mini desktops and ultrathin mobile personal computers, like notebooks, ultrabooks, and the occasional professional tablet.

The MSATA MP1 SSDs from Team Group come in capacities of 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB, and their read/write speeds vary according to them.

The 256 GB drive can reach the highest rates, of 530 MB/s sustained read speed and 440 MB/s constant write speed.

Not really on the same level as the top-tier SSDs that boast 550 MB/s and 500+ MB/s read/write performance, respectively, but still pretty high.

Especially since SSDs are mainly used as boot drives, while a secondary storage device, usually a hard disk drive, holds the bulk of the data and archived file collections.

So SSDs usually have to read data more than write it anyway, so the difference between the two rates is more than acceptable. Besides, HDDs are a lot slower and have a read-write difference well in excess of this one.

On that note, the Intel Smart Response Technology allows you to set up the mSATA MP1 as a cache drive, backed up by an HDD. In that mode, the operating system sees the two drives as a single device, a single partition as it were. When you copy something, it is scribed on the SSD, which takes very little time.

Later, when the PC isn't doing anything too strenuous, the files are relocated to the HDD platters via a background process.

Of course, the higher-capacity SSDs will act as single storage devices in systems easily enough, but you'll have to be prepared to pay quite a bit more than for the 64 GB one, more than the capacity difference alone would imply.

Unfortunately, that's all subject to guesswork because Team Group was not kind enough to include the prices in its product announcement. So until the mSATA MP1 SSDs make it to stores, we won't know just what an impact they will have on our wallets (or bank accounts, as the case may be).