Crucial announced today a bevy of solid-state drives for skinny gadgets ranging up to 256GB.
Sold under the Crucial brand name (the flash memory used in the SSDs is manufactured by parent company Micron Technology), the m4 drives deliver the performance of mainstream SSDs but in a much smaller 1.2 x 2.0 inch (3cm x 5cm) mSATA size -- the package typically used in ultrabooks and tablets.
SSDs are faster than standard spinning hard disk drives found in many laptops.
The m4 can be used as an upgrade to a device with an mSATA-compatible SSD or act as a cache to boost the performance of an existing magnetic hard disk drive.
The 256GB model is priced at $225.99, while the 128GB drive goes for $121.99.
A 64GB model is $80.99, while a 32GB is $52.99.
All drives are available now directly from Crucial.com.
The higher-capacity models deliver the best performance. For example, the 256GB version has a read rate of 500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and write speed of 260 MB/s. The smaller-capacity 32GB SSD has write performance of only 50 MB/s. All models are based on a 6-gigabits-per-second SATA interface.