STEC announced a series of 1-inch MACH4 solid state drives for the enterprise market. Bit Tech writes these new STEC MACH4 series disk are available with up to 32GB of storage capacity and Serial or Parallel ATA connectivity.
Designed for use in embedded computing devices, the drives use just a single watt of energy – about a twelfth that of a mechanical drive. The teeny-tiny drives also share the same advantages of their bigger brethren with enhanced resistance to shock and extreme temperatures.
Performance is pretty impressive for such a small device, too – the company quotes figures of 90MB/s read and 55MB/s write, although it's worth pointing out that this is for the faster SLC models which max out at 16GB storage, with the 32GB MLC units performing slower.
While you're unlikely to want to replace your desktop drives with these dinky units, they're more than likely to start showing up in future portable devices where the tiny size will be most useful – expect to see these in future MP3/MP4 players and sub-notebooks before long.
