Msata Solid State Drives

Hard drives have long since been the bottleneck in any computer system. Even with high speed drives reaching a staggering 15,000 RPM rating, the other electronics in a computer are always waiting on the hard drive before they can carry on with commands.

Said drives advanced significantly over the years in overall efficiency, but we could not fully overcome the limitation that these drives posed. The large amounts of cache, increased platter density, and blazingly fast RPM ratings helped, but they still left something to be desired, especially as other components inside the computer were progressing at an exponential rate. Hard drives simply could not keep up.
Then solid state technology entered the scene. Using flash memory as a permanent storage solution has been in practice for several years, but it most commonly came in the form of small USB “thumb drives” and digital media cards. But the demand for faster storage grew. And then solid state drives arrived on the scene!

These drives promised improved longevity, reduced risk of damage from heat and shock, a smaller and more lightweight form factor, and drastically faster read and write speeds over their predecessors. They also have taken advantage of the throughput ability of more recent generations of the SATA interface.
As the technology continues to improve and the cost continues to drop, laptops have adopted solid state/flash storage technology increasingly so. Because the price per gigabyte of solid state drives is still considerably higher than traditional mechanical drives, though, many have caught on to the trend of having a small, affordable solid state drive for applications coupled with an affordable hard drive for capacity. So what is the problem with this configuration?
In most desktops computers, or “towers,” this is perfectly fine. They have enough space for multiple drive bays. But in laptops, which are limited by design, this setup is not always feasible. More of the high-end laptops are offering two or more dedicated hard drive connections for 2.5-inch drives, but this requires more real estate and thus yields a larger system, consequently borrowing from portability.

And so we are introduced to a new form factor of solid state drives: mSATA!

These drives have found a niche in the laptop market as they are a fraction of the size of even a modern 2.5-inch solid state drive. Initially their capacities were quite limited, but current mSATA drives are just as big in capacity as any solid state drive with comparable performance!

While only a few low to mid range laptops are accommodating these drives, let alone more than one internal storage drive at all, many high-end gaming laptops are supporting multiple mSATA drives alongside at least one 2.5-inch storage drive. Prostar Computer are one such example, with their P150SM, P170SM, 377SM, and P570WM gaming laptops (among other models) offering multiple connections for said drives. Their popularity has certainly grown, and if the technology continues to improve and become as heavily implemented or adopted by end-users, we may see mSATA drives begin to take over their 2.5-inch counterparts in mobile computing altogether!