That is awesome. It is an utter waste of space to put SSD's into a 3.5 or 2.5" hard drive case.
This also opens up the door for some very compact PCs. Rather than having flash memory soldered onto the motherboard, I would like to see slots on regular PC motherboards for this.
Lots of questions: Is this some standardized connector, or has Toshiba created a defacto standard? Is this just an alternate SATA plug, or is the SATA daughter controller integrated onto the motherboard itself?
Putting an SSD in to a 3.5 or 2.5" hard drive enclosure is indeed a waste of space, but talking 'mSATA' to what is essentially memory seems to be a waste of speed.
All that work to stuff data down a serial pipe emulating a harddisk that isn't even there.
Flash has certain disadvantages that favor using a controller instead of direct addressing like DRAM. To make SSDs fast, you have to do wear leveling, command queueing, and parallelization of requests across all flash chips. Oh and when a cell fails, you have to remap spare cells. Doing this stuff in software would be a giant pain.
You can get raw flash chips, but it's hard to get decent performance and reliability out of them. That sort of setup is usually for embedded systems where writing is rare and read performance isn't important. Firmwares for switches and routers, for example.
While I understand your comments and that this can get hairy, also consider a softmodem-like implementation as a counter-example.
A softmodem (variously also called a Winmodem) is a partial or full software implementation of a modem, and helped reduce the parts counts and the costs of modems.
Ugly or not, it's a near certainty that we'll see a software (or firmware) implementation of this; some sort of "softssd" or "winssd" scheme.
You'd need custom file systems, etc., plus no PC BIOS will boot from something that doesn't resemble an ATA device. The whole ecosystem is based on layers of legacies, you should know that by now!
I've been expecting this from the moment I first saw an exploded view of an SSD. I understood the case allowed for the SSD to be used as a replacement drive, but figured it was only a matter of time before they'd be installed in slots on the motherboard. Next prediction: RAM/SSD soldered right onto the motherboard. [Yes, I realize I'm stating the obvious.]
Hate to steal Apple's thunder, but the first eeePC (of all things!) was, I think, the first to do this, and many non-HDD netbooks now use this design. The MBA ones just seem to be longer, allowing more flash chips. Previous examples not only have cribbed the mini PCIe's connector but also the entire form factor (5cm or 7cm long), despite not using the PCIe protocol. Interestingly, the MBA still seems to use the PCIe connector, just the form factor has changed.
So far the various netbook designs are electrically incompatible. I don't know where the MBA one fits into all this.
EDIT: looks like they standardised the interface as "mSATA" back in June.
Hate to steal EeePC's thunder, but this has been done in embedded PCs on mini-itx form factor computers since flash storage was available, pre-sata connectors. It looked like a 1-inch nub that fits in the IDE connector. It was perfect for embedded PCs since power requirements were always very low for flash memory and an easy way to save a watt.
This also opens up the door for some very compact PCs. Rather than having flash memory soldered onto the motherboard, I would like to see slots on regular PC motherboards for this.
Lots of questions: Is this some standardized connector, or has Toshiba created a defacto standard? Is this just an alternate SATA plug, or is the SATA daughter controller integrated onto the motherboard itself?
Edit: It's just standard mSATA. Controller on each drive. From the horse's mouth: http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2010_11/pr0801.htm?from...
mSATA is a standard: http://gizmodo.com/5364485/msata-its-like-sata-but-smaller