Mini-SATA, or mSATA, is a low-profile interface connector that enables more effective Serial ATA (SATA) integration in small form-factor drives roughly the size of a business card, such as solid state disks (SSDs). mSATA supports data transfer rates of 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s for high performance while enabling compact integration in a wide variety of applications for the hard drives and solid state drives (SSDs) used in ultraportable laptops, netbooks and similar mobile devices.
The Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO), the same organization responsible for the SATA, SATA II, and SATA III (SATA 6 Gb/s) specifications, released the mSATA specification in September 2009, and mSATA drives are now available from a variety of manufacturers, including Toshiba, Samsung, HP, Intel, SanDisk and Dell.
