Lite-On Develops Strange New mSATA SSD Design for Acer

[btarunr]

On taking apart the Acer S7 Ultrabook, The SSD Review discovered a strange new SSD form-factor, which bears the label of Lite-On, and carrying the model number "CMT-256L3M." This is perhaps the first mSATA SSD with two independent SSD subunits, one on each side. The mSATA interface itself is modified to have two SSD ports. The drive registers on the system BIOS as two individual drives, which is then run as a 256 GB (physical) RAID 0 volume by the BIOS and operating-system.

Each of the CMT-256L3M's two subunits feature a Marvell 88S9175 controller, which supports SATA 6 Gb/s interface, two 64 GB dual-channel 24 nm toggle NAND flash memory chips by Toshiba, and a Nanya-made DRAM cache chip. Putting the drive through sequential-friendly benchmarks such as CrystalDiskMark shows a sequential read speed of the drive (combined with its two subunits) to be around 877 MB/s, with sequential writes up to 672 MB/s. Multi-subunit SSDs aren't new, most high-end consumer SSDs from the pre-TRIM, pre-SandForce era used to be dual- to quad-subunit drives. The CMT-256L3M is the first one in the super-compact mSATA form-factor, and its performance numbers could impress more Ultrabook designers.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[HammerON]

Very interesting design and great speeds

 

[de.das.dude]

probably an OEM part.

 

[Velvet Wafer]

phew, thats quite a worthful piece of small form factor tech

 

[Nordic]

I would like my hands on one of these.... only as long as it takes to install it...

 

[xorbe]

I would like my hands on one of these.... only as long as it takes to install it...

I think it only works in this one laptop due to the special interface.

 

[Nordic]

mSATA SSD

Still msata. Unless it has some sorta special bios something it should work.

 

[cadaveca]

Still msata. Unless it has some sorta special bios something it should work.

There are many motherboards with mSATA built in. Not one of them will support this drive properly, since they all use SATA 3 Gb/s ports, which is not capable of the reported speeds.

There are SATA 6 Gb/s add-in cards, however, although those are still few in numbers.

 

[Nordic]

There are many motherboards with mSATA built in. Not one of them will support this drive properly, since they all use SATA 3 Gb/s ports, which is not capable of the reported speeds.

There are SATA 6 Gb/s add-in cards, however, although those are still few in numbers.

I wasn't planning to buy one if I could, probably out of my price range anyways. Well I would still certainly like my hands on one of these.

 

[cadaveca]

I wasn't planning to buy one if I could, probably out of my price range anyways. Well I would still certainly like my hands on one of these.

I want one.


It's very curious that a SATA 3Gb/s drive gets this, or that even just a single mSATA slot appears to support two drives on a single PCB....it's quite confusing to me, and has my curiosity piqued for sure.

pricing cannot be that much, since this is out of some tablet or something, it might be using a proprietary interface or something..I dunno...

Anyway, the fact it is performing as well as it is is why it made news, and I guess we'll either have to pick up the unit that has this, or wait for dude to return from vacation to get more info.