Samsung is bringing its much praised 840 EVO family of SSDs down to ultra thin territory with a handful of new models in the mSATA form factor. At 1.5 inches thick that's a full inch thinner than a standard 2.5-inch laptop drive, yet the company was able to retain the lineup's 120GB, 250GB, 500GB and 1TB capacities – an industry first – as well as the same up to 540MB/s and 520MB/s sequential write and read times.
Other performance claims include up to 98,000 random read IOPS and 90,000 random write IOPS. In addition, the new mSATA SSDs come bundled with the latest version of Samsung's Magician software, which further boosts performance to up to 1GB/s reads on RAPID ( Real-time Accelerated Processing of I/O Data) mode.
The 840 EVO mSATA SSD uses Samsung's newest 128Gb NAND flash memory which is based on a "10nm class process technology" (marketing speak for 19nm). In order to achieve the impressive 1 terabyte milestone Samsung had to cram a total of four 256GB flash memory packages, each containing 16 layers of 128Gb chips.
The new drives support 256-bit AES encryption and are fully TCG Opal and IEEE 1667 compliant. Samsung says the 840 EVO mSATA SSD lineup will be available this month globally, although details such as an exact launch date, along with pricing and warranty on these units are still to be disclosed.
