The new MacBook Air notebooks are ridiculously thin, measuring just 0.68 inches at the thicket point and 0.11 inches at the thinnest. One of the reasons Apple was able to make the laptops that thin was the move away from traditional hard drives or 2.5 inch solid state disks. Instead, Apple went with tiny solid state disks that look more like sticks of RAM than hard drives. They’re built by Toshiba… and now Toshiba is offering the new SSDs to other computer builders.
The Toshiba Blade X-gale series of solid state disks come in 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB capacities. They offer read speeds up to 220MB/s and write speeds up to 180MB/s (although average speeds will likely be much slower), and measure just 2.2 millimeters, or less than 0.09 inches thick.
There’s now word on pricing, but Toshiba is offering the X-gale solid state disks to system builders at this point, not end users. That means it will probably be a little while before we start to see notebooks beside the MacBook Air using the X-gale series SSDs for storage.
via Electronista
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