Micron has long been a major player in the Solid State Drive space, releasing the speedy RealSSD C300 back in 2010 and the second-gen RealSSD C400 last year. Today, the company announced another milestone as it's putting the power and speed of its C400 drives into the tiny mSATA form factor. The Micron RealSSD C400 mSATA is available now to OEM partners and will be sold to consumers under the Crucial brand starting in the summer.
mSATA SSDs as a class offer the incredible speed, power efficiency, and durability of solid state storage in a significantly smaller package than traditional 2.5 or 1.8-inch drives. A number of Ultrabooks and other thin-and-light notebooks have mSATA slots today and some even combine mSATA SSDs with traditional hard drives with the SSD serving as a cache for frequently-used files.
Available in 32, 64, 128, 256 and 512GB capacities, the Micron RealSSD C400 mSATA supports high-speed SATA 6Gb/s transfers, though it's backward compatible with notebooks that only have SATA 3Gb/s capability. Support for the speedy SATA 6Gb/s standard means that the drives can read up to 500 MBps (for the 64GB and higher model) and write up to 260 MBps (for the 256GB model). With these kinds of speeds, notebook vendors can build smaller notebooks without compromising on performance.
Micron does not disclose its OEM pricing structure, but a company rep told us that the mSATA version of the C400 would cost a little bit less than the standard SATA versions that are available today. The 256GB 2.5-inch version of the C400 costs around $300 at crucial.com where it is sold under the name Crucial M4.
