TDK to launch smallest Micro SATA SSD drives

TDK will debut its HS1-series solid-state disk drives at the Computex Taipei 2008 show due to start tomorrow in Taiwan. At 1.8 inches, the drives are the smallest on the market to use a Micro SATA interface, and are meant for notebook computers and industrial devices. The drives are available in 16, 32 and 64GB capacities, and use single-level cell NAND flash memory. Prototype versions of the HS1 drives were first shown at CEATEC in 2007, and TDK says are now ready for use in industrial devices.

The HS1 drives are rated at 100MBps reading and 50MBps writing burst speeds thanks to a four-channel bus between the controller LSI and NAND memory. The write speeds are similar to those of HDDs partly because TDK used wear-levelling, which averages out the number of rewrite operations over each cell, to help promote longevity.

To decrease power consumption, the LSI, NAND memory and SATA interface circuit are contained on one chip instead of two. In slumber mode, the chip uses 20mA of energy, a number TDK hypes as the lowest in the industry.

For security, the drives use a 128-bit AES encryption, while a 7-bit error correction circuits ensure data integrity. SATA offers more headroom than PATA, making the design upgradeable.

Samples of the SSDs are currently available, priced at an equivalent of about $2,000 for the 64GB model, $1,500 for the 32GB model and $900 for the 16GB version. [via Tech-On]