Netlist Intros mSATA Mini And Slim SSDs

It wasn't too long ago that we heard about new HDDs weekly, and new SSDs bi-monthly. Now, it's almost the opposite. Flash-based storage has blossomed tremendously over the past years, and with prices finally falling to reasonable levels, there's more reason than ever before to make the leap to NAND. Netlist has just launched two new products: the mSATA mini and mSATA slim SSDs. These modules are slimmed down even more than usual, mostly because they're meant less for consumers and more for the enterprise. Those investing in storage for datacenters, networking and storage businesses will likely take the most interest.

The mSATA mini SSD module offers storage capacity of up to 32GB with onboard 64MB DRAM cache, while the mSATA slim SSD module offers storage capacities up to 128GB with onboard 64MB DRAM cache. Both products' smaller form-factor and SSD support for ultra-dense applications makes the mSATA mini and slim modules ideal for datacenter equipment and embedded systems, or so the company says. You're probably curious about specs and performance, so here's the skinny on that: these are fully SATA v2.6 compatible, the mSATA modules support data rates to 3.0Gbps, SMART functionality, expanded register 48-bit addressing mode, and power management. The mSATA mini has typical read performance up to 120MB/s and typical write performance up to 48MB/s.  The mSATA slim has typical read performance up to 240MB/s and typical write performance to 190MB/s.


Pricing remains mum for now, but being that these are marketed towards business, don't count on them being inexpensive.