PC makers have a choice when designing ultrabooks: include a large hard drive with a small solid state cache disk to meet Intel’s ultrabook guidelines, or just include a solid state disk.
The SSD-only option lets device makers build thinner PCs, because solid state disks don’t have to take up as much physical space as a hard disk. They also offer faster read and write speeds, which improves the overall performance of SSD-only ultrabooks.
But most SSD-only ultrabooks offer just 128GB of 256GB of storage space, because solid state disks are expensive… and because small-form-factor SSDs typically don’t come in larger sizes.
Mushkin is hoping to change that.
In January the company plans to bring a new 480GB mSATA solid state disk to market with a suggested retail price of $499.99.
The Mushkin Atlas 480GB mSATA SSD is designed for ultrabooks, where physical space is at a premium. The module measures 2″ x 1.2″ x 0.19″ and has a mini PCIe interface.
At about a dollar per gigabyte, the SSD is still considerably more expensive than a hard drive. But if you’re looking for an utrabook that actually has the storage capacity to hold your entire music and video collection, you might be willing to pay a little extra… maybe.
How fast are they?
Capacity is meaningless if it takes forever to do anything.
nobody in their right mind is going to pay a price like that for 480gb – if they do they are an idiot
Just tack a wifi and bluetooth chip and antennae on there and they would have a winner.
I am not convinced paying the premium for this kind of a storage upgrade is worth it. My guess is that most ultrabook users will go with the less expensive (and smaller) ssd option and store extra files offsite in the cloud on on an external drive.
Same here. I tend to keep the majority of my collection on a large networked server at home, then every so often I’ll refresh the selection I carry around with me on my laptop and phone. If the price of these ever drops to $0.50/GB or so, I could see them really taking off in popularity.