Mushkin Intros "World's First" mSATA 480GB SSD

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By Kevin Parrish
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This new mSATA SSD will be available next month in the United States for $499.99.

Mushkin's 240GB Atlas mSATA SSD

Mushkin announced on Wednesday the upcoming launch of the "world's first" mSATA SSD with a 480 GB capacity on a single module. It's the latest addition to the company's Atlas family of mSATA drives, and is scheduled to be available early January 2013 in the U.S. at select resellers and distributors.

A worldwide distribution is scheduled for mid-January 2013, the company said.

According to the spec list, the new 480 GB drive will sport the SandForce SF-2281 controller with an unthrottled IOPS, and connect via a SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) interface. Features will include support for TRIM and S.M.A.R.T., ATA APM, Security Set and NCQ. It will also sport built-in BCH ECC (up to 55 bits correctable per 512-byte sector), user-upgradeable firmware, a mini-PCIe interface and more.

Brian Flood, Director of Product Development at Mushkin commented, "Keeping z-height as low as possible and managing to fit eight NAND flash chips and a controller on a mSATA PCB was no easy feat, but now capacity-hungry Ultrabook and notebook users can go beyond the 256 GB mSATA barrier."

The next step down in the Atlas mSATA series is the 240 GB version. Also connecting via a SATA 3 (6 Gb/s) interface, this drive offers read speeds of up to 560 MB/s and write speeds of up to 530 MB/s. Additional features include a MTBF of 2 million hours, a SandForce SF-2281 controller, an IOPS of 80,000, and user-upgradeable firmware.

Also available in the Atlas mSATA series is a 120 GB model and a 60 GB model.

Mushkin’s upcoming Atlas 480 GB mSATA SSD will retail for $499.99 USD next month, and come with a three-year limited warranty. Currently the product is not listed on the company webpage, so keep checking back to get a full list of specs.

At nearly $1 per GB, this mSATA package is nearing what we're seeing from 2.5-inch SSDs.

Stay tuned for an upcoming round-up of mSATA options coming soon!

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Kevin Parrish
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16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • thecolorblue
    way too much space!!! ... according to Microsoft

    who offers up a grand total of 16gb usable space on its Win RT device (of course advertised at 32gb).

    Reply
  • jacobdrj
    I was surprised the MSRP wasn't more, TBH. This is a great option for those lucky few who have mSATA slots in their mobile devices...I only wish that I had an mSATA slot in any of my devices :(
    Reply
  • rebel1280
    mmmm tasty snack for my ITX board!
    Reply
  • drwho1
    "At nearly $1 per GB, this mSATA package is nearing what we're seeing from 2.5-inch SSDs."

    Correction: "At over $1 per GB, this mSATA package is way more $$$ than we're seeing from 2.5-inch SSDs."
    Reply
  • halcyon
    I'm psyched for my Dell XPS 15. This with a Hitachi 1TB 7.2K HDD will really be the kind of storage setup I seek. Nice job Mushkin and thanks for pricing it appropriately.
    Reply
  • sliem
    Cool, soon it'll be 5TB SSD.
    Why is it not already 5TB SSD?
    Reply
  • halcyon
    Next Mushkin or Seagate or whoever should make a nice hybrid drive. Say a 1TB @ 7.2K with a 64MB cache and 16GB SLC Flash. Seems like that would be a hot seller.
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    This is the piece that has been missing!
    For the last year I have wanted to build a portable NLE setup, and you can fit a really really nice high powered rig in a very small box, but the HDD, and even SSD space requirement always mucks up airflow. But with this you can snap it in a mobo that has msata on the back and it would take literally 0 space away from the rest of the box. If the price ever comes down a bit on this then I would be all over it!
    Reply
  • CaedenV
    sliemCool, soon it'll be 5TB SSD.Why is it not already 5TB SSD?1) nand memory is expensive, especially in high density solutions. at $1/GB a 5TB drive would be $5000. But because super high density memory is even more expensive you would really be talking about $10,000+
    2) Controllers do not currently do more than 1/2 TB. If you see a drive bigger than 512GB then they have 2 controllers inside doing some form of RAID to provide the space. Multiply that out to a 5TB drive and you have a very complicated mess with far too many failure points involved. Thankfully 1TB controllers are coming next year, which will open up the door for 1TB mainstream drives, and 2TB specialty drives, but my bet is that it will stay at those storage points a few years before we see 2TB controllers and 4TB drives. So anything larger than 4TB on a consumer SSD will not be seen for probably 5-7 years. However, there will always be things like the OCZ Revo drives which offer much more capacity (I think you can order a 16TB Revo4), but you pay through the nose for such storage capacity.
    3) Form factor. Simply put, this device has 1 controller chip, and 4 memory modules, which means that each module is holding 128GB of memory. Considering most chips are 128Gb (bits, not Bytes), we are talking about an 8 fold increase in density over your average memory size. That is also why it costs over $1/GB when mainstream drives are getting closer to 50-75 cents per GB. If you put these chips in a normal sized SSD you would see a capacity of 2TB (16 chips at 128GB each) if someone made a controller that could handle that kind of space.
    Reply
  • danwat1234
    halcyonI'm psyched for my Dell XPS 15. This with a Hitachi 1TB 7.2K HDD will really be the kind of storage setup I seek. Nice job Mushkin and thanks for pricing it appropriately.Hitachi doesn't make a Travelstar 7K1000 drive yet
    Reply