Samsung squeeze a terabyte into a tiny SSD

Features
By published

Remember the excellent 1TB Samsung EVO drive I checked out back in the Summer? No matter, Sammy have trumped their own SSD by now releasing one that's about one third the size of a standard solid state drive. Ladies and gentlefolk, here's the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA sliver of SSD loveliness.

Effectively it's the same tech they've been using in their 2.5-inch EVO drives since launch, so you can expect the same levels of performance. Most importantly that includes class-leading random 4K read/write performance. That 4K prowess is most indicative of general operating system performance as it's the constant shunting around of those tiny files that impacts most on a smooth desktop experience.

That also means we can expect these mSATA drives to cost around the same sort of price as their 2.5-inch counterparts; so expect just over 50p/GB.

The upgrade market in laptops is going to be where Samsung are aiming at, but in the small form factor crowd these high-capacity, high-performance drives could be a boon for the next generation of tiny PCs.

Sadly a lot of the mini ITX Intel boards I've checked out recently don't have the space to cope with these longer mSATA cards, but the AMD A88X mini ITX I've got in my cupboard does. That's the lovely wee board I'm waiting to fill out with an AMD Kaveri APU once I'm back from CES in the New Year.

Dave James
Dave James
Editor-in-Chief, Hardware

Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.