Faster mSATA SSDs could lead to upgradeable tablets.

You probably haven't given much thought to upgrading your tablet PC's built-in storage, primarily because your hands are tied. If you need more storage, you can buy a microSD card (if your tablet supports it), use an external USB storage device (again, if your tablet supports it), or tap into the cloud. But what if you could swap out the built-in SSD for a faster, more capacious model? That's wishful thinking at the moment, but if companies like Super Talent keep releasing performance-oriented mSATA drives, perhaps tablet makers will take notice.

Mushkin's Atlas 480GB mSATA SSD is small in size but big in capacity.

Mushkin will start shipping what it claims is the world's first 480GB capacity mSATA solid state drive (SSD) in January 2013, the company announced this week. Unlike traditional SSDs, mSATA (Mini-SATA) drives are much smaller and sport a connector that looks similar to a PCI Express Mini Card interface that's even electrically compatible, though the data signals need to be fed to the SATA host controller.

As far as Adata is concerned, an influx of motherboards sporting built-in mSATA slots is going to create a demand for mSATA solid state drives (SSDs). The idea behind mSATA SSDs is to provide a fast cache solution to aid the primary storage device, typically a mechanical hard disk drive (HDD), to achieve system performance comparable to running a standalone SSD at a fraction of the cost. Towards that end, Adata today announced the launch of its XPG SX300 and Premier Pro SP300 mSATA SSDs.

It takes a collective effort from component makers to realize Intel's vision of what an Ultrabook should look like, and Samsung is doing its part to keep the form factor slim and sleek. The storage maker just kicked off volume production of its Mini-Serial ATA (mSATA) solid state drives (SSDs) designed for all kinds of ultra-slim notebooks, and in particular Ultrabooks.