Tiny SATA flash drives
Samsung has announced a new type of SATA based SSD drives which are specifically targeting the budget notebook and netbook market which are only 30 percent of the size of a 2.5in hard drive or SSD.
The advantage of these new SSD drives is that they're using a standard interface and as such should offer broader compatibility than the more custom solutions we've seen so far in the various netbooks from Asus and Acer.
Samsung will offer the drives in 8, 16 and 32GB flavors and all three models use MLC flash memory. The 32GB drive offers the best performance with sequential write speeds of 70MB/s, while the 16GB drive only offers 45MB/s and the 8GB drive is not much faster than the fastest USB flash drives at 25MB/s. All three models offer 90MB/s read speeds which is about three times as fast as the fastest USB flash drives.
All three models features 32MB of cache and the same SATA II controller that Samsung uses on its 128GB SSD drives. The new drives are sampling now, although no pricing was revealed and we doubt that these drives will be sold directly to the general consumer market.
You can find the press release and some pictures of the new drives here
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