Toshiba Introduces ‘Blade’ Style SSD’s

Following the successful integration of ‘blade’ style Solid State Drive’s (SSD’s) by Apple into the new MacBook Air, Toshiba have announced a new line of SSD’s that they will make available to OEMs and system builders. The new blade-shaped modules known as the ‘Blade X-gale series’ takes on a much smaller form factor compared to that of traditional small form factor hard drive.

The new drives will be available in 64Gb, 128Gb and 256Gb flavours with the two smaller drives proving to be 42% thinner than that of a typical mSATA form factor at only 2.2mm. This is all down to the size reduction of portable devices and the ever growing amount of features that are being packed in at the same time. Even though the devices have been made much smaller, don’t think that this has had an impact on the speed. With seqential read/ write speeds of 220MB/s and 180MB/s respectivly based on the SATA 2.6 (3Gbps) interface, you will still see blistering speeds and a MTTF of 1 Million times.

As the new drives are not available on the retail market as of yet, there is no current pricing, and as the laptop has to be specially designed to accomodate the odd form, we will only be seeing these on high-end models for the onset. Keep watching though as we’ll soon expect to see other manufacturers follow suit and the new design becoming more mainstream later on.