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Samsung has a tiny solid state drive that might make its way into future notebooks and netbooks. Based on the mSATA (mini-SATA) interface, the drive would require no external housing and “would plug directly into an internal PCI Express (PCIe) slot in a desktop, laptop or netbook,” according to Computerworld.

The main hurdle is that the PCIe slot isn’t integrated into most current motherboard designs, so it’d have to become a standard present in future products. As for the drive itself, capacities reach 64GB and it uses the serial ATA interface to transfer data.

For use in netbooks or notebooks, 64GB may be enough storage for everyday use but in desktops and more fully-featured portable computers, the mSATA drives could house the operating system and programs while a standard high-capacity hard drive would be used in tandem to store other files like photos, videos, and music.

It’s unknown how much additional cost the mSATA drives would add to a computer’s bottom line but the draw would be that we’d theoretically see much thinner and lighter systems since the drive itself is about a third of the size of a business card.

[via Computerworld]