Mushkin's 480GB mSATA SSD Now Available
Mushkin revealed its 480GB Atlas mSATA SSD a while ago, but it has now officially gone on sale in the US.
The 480GB Atlas mSATA SSD is aimed at consumers who want a high-performance low form factor SSD, and therefore it also has a user-upgradeable firmware. Specifications include a SandForce SF-2281 controller with unthrottled IOPS, a SATA3 (6Gb/s) interface, Security Set and NCQ, TRIM support (OS or driver support required), S.M.A.R.T. support, built-in BCH ECC (up to 55 bits correctable per 512 Byte sector), support for ATA APM, high speed MLC NAND, mSATA form factor (50.80 x 29.85 x 4.85mm), and a mini PCIe interface.
The max read speed is 540MBps, and the max write speed is 425MBps. With 78K random read IOPS and 28K random write IOPS the little SSD shouldn't disappoint for performance either.
Mushkin aims for the drive to be available worldwide by the end of January.
The mSATA 480GB Atlas SSD is covered by a respectable 3 year warranty.
The suggested retail price is $499.99, however, the unit has already seen a street price of $449.99 at Newegg.

I'm not sure how "a street price of $449.99" for a 480GB drive is over $1/GB...
i remember a year ago we were all aiming for the $1 a gig point, they are coing down quite fast, give ti another year i am sure they will drop another 25-30% at least. if you look for a good sale you can get them in the $0.60ish per gig.
as for this type of drive the idea of a pci dribve like this with that density and speed ... if i had the money to drop on something like an ssd i would love one... just to ahrd to justify for my gaming computer... still want though
I'm not sure how "a street price of $449.99" for a 480GB drive is over $1/GB...
I think you'll be getting that call sometime next year.
But they have to continue to fall to about $.25/GB before they become widely adopted and are affordable for the average user to buy one bigger than 128GB.
In my opinion, a more expensive form of storage will only gain real traction when it reaches the 10% level. That means that you can buy an SSD which has 1/10 as much capacity as a hard drive at the same price (e.g. if 2 TB HDD == $100 then 200 GB SSD == $100).
The other barrier to adoption is a lack of good data management systems that automatically put the right data on the right device without a lot of complicated user setup and continued vigilance to keep everything in the right place.
You mean if Microsoft and Apple spent their billions sitting in offshore accounts, to actually offer a decent OS interface that would do that automatically?
I don't think you have much of a choice for many laptops. Most of them only have one 2.5" drive and a DVD drive space.
1$ a gb for an os drive
i love that drive
.50$ for a game drive
cant wait for that point because my brother has one with games on it... got to love next to no load times.
.25$ for general small thing storage
images, saved files, and so forth. i have a folder with over 40k images in it, and another with about 20k rars, on a hdd, those folders and files are a nightmare to deal with, but on a ssd... just cant wait.
I come from an era where we used to pay 1000$ for 2G harddisks..
and the home users paid 300$ for 500MB harddisks ...
and the one US dollar that time is worth 4 US $ today (in gold price for example)
today people are Complaining about 440$ for 480G harddisk that is light speed...
lol , stop being greedy and open your wallet ...
all my Storage is SSD in my system and it is STILL cheaper than my game box price I used to pay for 20 years ago ... with 16MB ram and 2G harddisk ...
people need to wake up ... IT IS CHEAP to have it .. but you dont want to pay for it.
true PCs became cheaper you can have a full gaming PC for 1000$ today ... but in the PAST this was a dream and Gaming PC were over 2000$ and STILL People bought them and didnt consider them expensive , given ALSO that that time a new CAR price was 1/4 of today that is that 2000$ is worth 8000$ today ..
wake up people , open your wallet and enjoy it...
ex. my thinkpad has a 2.5in drive bay and an msata port. If there had been any reasonable msata (like the msata crucial m4 - faster than this one) then i'd still have a spinning 700gb drive and an ssd in the smata port rather than replacing the spinning drive.
check the last msata review. 256gb drives. for some reason Mushkin drives were marginally slower then they should have been.
Not necessarily; A lot of higher-end motherboards come with mSATA ports these days, where you can either put an SSD in there to use as a boot drive, or as a caching SSD. It's becoming increasingly popular to throw a cheap 8gb or 16gb caching SSD in the mSATA port in both laptops and desktops because it's a very affordable way to get SSD esque performance.
I'm not sure what you are talking about. My first hard disk back in 1986 was $800 for a 10MB. By the time 2GB drives came around 1997 they were about $200.
In any case, the point is not that SSDs at $1/GB are super cheap when compared to what we used to pay for a GB 10 or 20 years ago, but how they compare with alternatives TODAY! SSDs are quite a bit faster than HDDs so they can command a premium price. But when a new technology offers just a 2x or 3x performance gain at a 10x or 20x price premium, wide adoption is not going to happen.
Just like the new 4 TB HDDs. Regular people will not buy them when they cost more than 2 separate 2TB drives unless you have some special condition that makes it worth while. Data centers that are more concerned with power, heat, and space than drive price would rather buy one disk than two, but everyone else will wait until the price drops.
So it's not about being greedy or cheap. It is about being practical.
Actually, I hope that neither Microsoft nor Apple gets its act together and tries to solve this problem. I am currently working on a new data management solution that I think will be far superior to anything they might develop but my solution will more likely be more accepted if the pain that currently accompanies the archaic architectures of file systems remains strong.
I remember when 10MB drives were $7000, hell 512KB fixed head (512) drum drives were even more.