Mini-SATA-- the Latest Industry Standard?

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Intel 310Some drive manufacturers believe mini-SATA (mSATA) will become the industry standard for mobile computing. Intel and Samsung, amongst others, are launching mSata products, such as Intel's 310 series.

Introduced at Intel's Developer Forum, mSATA is the smallest SATA connector, designed for the flexible form-factor offered by mini-SSDs (whereas SSDs are normally designed to fit the traditional 2.5" HDD form factor). Thus, mSATA SSDs allow vendors and OEMs to design and develop drives in a variety of sizes and shapes, depending on what the buyer needs.

However mSATA drives use a PCIe slot-- which current PCs don't natively support. Since it uses a PCIe mini-connector, the SATA protocol allows seamless data moving between HDD and smaller SSD.

This allows for dual-drive machines where the mSATA device carries the OS (increasing overall system performance) while the HDD acts as mass storage device.

Mini-SATA drives are also marketed to OEMs for incorporation into tablet devices.

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