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The SATA IO working group has announced the arrival of a new micro SSD specification and the intention to develop another known as SATA Express.
The micro SSD spec is aimed at mobile devices that need very small solid-state storage drives powered by the SATA interface. Rather than use a physical connector, µSSD is based on the ball-grid array (BGA) rather like a processor.
"Connector-free embedded SSDs allow OEMs to develop a new generation of thin yet powerful tablets and ultrathin notebooks," said SanDisk storage boss Kevin Conley.
SATA Express, which the SATA IO Group expects to finalise as a standard by the end of the year, represents a combination of the SATA drive interface standard and PCI Express 3.0.
The SATA Express technology will, the group says, provide a cost-effective means to increase device interface speeds to 8Gb/s and 16Gb/s
The group said that SATA Express would ultimately appear as new motherboard connectors that would support SATA or SATA Express with the new standard reserved for ultra-fast applications such as next-generation SSD drives.
