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mSATA is a design form that's much more compact than the standard 2.5-inch laptop drive. This means the drive can fit in more portable mobile devices, including ultraportable notebooks or even tablets -- as long as they have an mSATA socket. While mSATA SSDs are not new, the new 840 Evo mSATA SSD will offer the same capacity as its standard drive, up to 1TB, making it (for now) the largest on the market.
According to Samsung, the new 840 Evo mSATA SSD utilizes Samsung's advanced 128-gigabit (Gb) NAND flash memory based on 10-nanometer class process technology. This means that for a 1TB version SSD, a total of four flash memory packages are used, each package having 16 layers of 128Gb chips. The 1TB mSATA SSD comes in a thickness of 3.85 millimeters and a weight of just 8.5 grams, or some 40 percent thinner and just a twelfth of the weight of a typical 2.5-inch hard drive.
Similar to the 2.5-inch version, the new drive also uses Samsung's proprietary controller and supports TurboWrite technology and RAPID mode via Samsung Magician 4.3 software, to offer 98,000 random read and 90,000 random write IOPS, as well as sequential read and write speed of 540MBps and 520MBps, respectively. The drive supports 256-bit AES data encryption and is compliant with TCG Opal and IEEE 1667 standards.
The 840 Evo mSATA SSD is slated to be available this month in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities that cost $150, $260, $490 and $860, respectively.
