Intel Developing New SSD Specs For Ultrabooks

Digitimes’ Josephine Lien and Joseph Tsai report that Intel is working on a unified specification for mSATA SSDs targeted at ultrabook applications, seeking cooperation with PC vendors and NAND flash companies, and that details will likely be finalized in September, according to sources at memory makers.

Lien and Tsai say the new SSD specification is expected to be fully adopted into ultrabooks in 2013, but whether or not it becomes a standard specification for traditional PC notebooks will depend on brand vendors’ attitudes about follow-up issues such as left-over inventories of old, non-compliant components.

Digitimes’ sources reportedly say Intel wishes to unify mSATA SSD specifications into one single standard, with most PC brand vendors and NAND flash makers, such as Micron, SanDisk and Samsung, participating in the discussion, and that one reason why Intel is aggressively pushing the NGFF SSD standard is that current mSATA SSD specifications impose limitations on the number of NAND flash chips that can be used (4-5 maximum), so in order to facilitate = SSDs with more than 512GB of storage capacity, adopting the NGFF standard, which allows NAND chips on both sides of the PCB, thau relieving that limitation, is necessary.

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