Remember the excellent 1TB Samsung EVO drive I checked out back in the Summer? No matter, Sammy have trumped their own SSD by now releasing one that's about one third the size of a standard solid state drive. Ladies and gentlefolk, here's the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA sliver of SSD loveliness.
At 5cm x 3cm the new range of mSATA SSDs is certainly space-conscious and is primarily designed so that those laptop peops have access to the same sort of speedy SSD capacity that we've become so used to on the desktop side.
Effectively it's the same tech they've been using in their 2.5-inch EVO drives since launch, so you can expect the same levels of performance. Most importantly that includes class-leading random 4K read/write performance. That 4K prowess is most indicative of general operating system performance as it's the constant shunting around of those tiny files that impacts most on a smooth desktop experience.
That also means we can expect these mSATA drives to cost around the same sort of price as their 2.5-inch counterparts; so expect just over 50p/GB.
The upgrade market in laptops is going to be where Samsung are aiming at, but in the small form factor crowd these high-capacity, high-performance drives could be a boon for the next generation of tiny PCs.
Sadly a lot of the mini ITX Intel boards I've checked out recently don't have the space to cope with these longer mSATA cards, but the AMD A88X mini ITX I've got in my cupboard does. That's the lovely wee board I'm waiting to fill out with an AMD Kaveri APU once I'm back from CES in the New Year.
