Mushkin, leading designer and manufacturer of high-performance computer products, said on Wednesday that the company would begin shipping the world's highest capacity – 480GB –  mSATA solid-state drive in January 2013. The new Atlas 480GB SSD will not only feature leading-edge capacity, but also provide very high performance.

"We are excited to present our latest Atlas 480GB mSATA solid state drive, demonstrating once again Mushkin's consistent ability to combine top performance, functionality, capacity, and low-power innovation. Keeping z-height as low as possible and managing to fit eight NAND flash chips and a controller on a mSATA PCB was no easy feat, but now capacity-hungry ultrabook and notebook users can go beyond the 256 GB mSATA barrier," said Brian Flood, director of product development at Mushkin.

The new Atlas 480GB solid-state drive is based on SandForce SF-2281 controller and high-performance multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory. The drives should feature read/write speeds up to 560MB/s/530MB/s and 4KB random read/write IOPS [input/output operations per second] up to 80000.

Mushkin's Atlas 480 GB mSATA solid-state drive is scheduled to be available early January 2013 in the U.S. at select resellers and distributors and Worldwide distribution scheduled for mid-January 2013. MSRP Mushkin's Atlas 480 GB mSATA is $499.99. Mushkin's Atlas 480 GB mSATA solid-state drive is covered by a three-year limited warranty.

Tags: Mushkin, SSD, Atlas, SandForce, mSATA, NAND, Flash