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Samsung Electronics has announced volume production of SSDs that support the mSATA interface. The drives are designed for use in ultra-slim notebook PCs such as Ultrabook.

Combining Samsung's new high-performance mSATA SSDs with the latest multi-core processors will help PC manufacturers to substantially improve performance of their ultrabook-class portable PCs up to that of notebook PCs, in meeting ever-increasing consumer needs.

The new Samsung mSATA SSDs will be available in 256, 128 and 64 gigabyte (GB) densities as main storage devices, and also at 32GB for caching. They measure 50.95 x 30 x 3.8 millimeters and weigh a mere eight grams.

The new SSDs will be part of the Samsung PM830 product family that was introduced earlier this year. They make use of Samsung's advanced 20nm class NAND flash memory components which incorporate the toggle DDR interface.

Utilizing high-performance SATA 6Gb/s controllers based on Samsung's own technology, the new mSATA SSDs can operate at sequential read and write speeds of 500 megabytes per second (MB/s) and of 260MB/s respectively, under optimum conditions. This is, more than six times the speed of hard disk drives typically offering a data transfer rate of 80MB/s.