Samsung has ventured into the smallest possible format for solid-state drives with sample production of its first mini-card designs. The SATA II drives are 80 percent smaller than 2.5-inch notebook drives and even smaller than regular 1.8-inch drives, letting them fit into handheld devices and particularly thin or small netbooks. By using 40 nanometer memory and a modern controller, however, the mini-card SSDs perform about as well as full-size SSDs and achieve peak read speeds of 200MB per second and write speeds of 100MB per second.

 

 

The denser memory also permits a level of storage that isn’t normally found in this class with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB capacities coming on launch. All of them use just 0.3W of power and so contribute little to the total power drain.

Samsung hasn’t said when mass production starts but usually starts sampling just before mass production takes place. Customers are equally a mystery, but the Korean company has suggested that its mini-card SSDs become a JEDEC standard and hopes this could take effect as early as the start of summer. Standardization would let other companies make similar SSDs without having to talk to Samsung or to redesign components from scratch.