C400

The arrival of affordable, high-performance client SSDs gave us two (closely related) things: 1) a high-speed primary storage option that could work in both a notebook or a desktop, and 2) independence from traditional hard drive form factors. Unlike traditional hard drives, solid state storage didn't have the same correlation between performance and physical size. The 2.5" form factor was chosen initially because of the rising popularity of notebooks and the fact that desktops could use a 2.5" drive with the aid of a cheap adapter. Since then, many desktop cases now ship with 2.5" drive bays. It turns out that even the 2.5 wide, 9.5mm tall form factor was a bit overkill for many SSDs. We saw the first examples of this with the arrival...