While SATA III (with a throughput of up to 6Gbps, double that of what we've been limited to for quite some time now) is the talk of the town in the performance storage sector now, the guys also have another ace up their sleeve with the upcoming introduction of mini-SATA (or mSATA for short).

The picture above gives you a good idea of just how miniature we're talking with the Toshiba based drive on the left using a standard sized SATA connector whilst to the right is a drive based around the new mini-SATA standard.

It's been said mSATA continues to support both 1.5GB/s and also 3GB/s transfer rates and the interface is primarily designed for very small drives no bigger than a business card.