 Welcome to my unboxing of the adata 60 gig msata SSD xm1 3 so this is as you guys can see a bit smaller than a typical SSD so here's a two and a half inch SSD for reference the whole box is like the size of a regular SSD so what is this for if you don't have an msata slot then it's not real relevant to you but if you do have an msata slot then it's very relevant to you stands to reason am i right there you go that's the whole size of the there's a whole SSD in there msata is basically a standard of sata that takes the standard size connectors and makes them even smaller so it is actually here we're going to go get a sata cable as well as a sata power adapter of some sort pen for pen this is pretty much the same darn thing as sata except that you can clearly see that that won't fit and then you can clearly see that this power cable is not going to fit see how the spacing is much wider in here can you see that then here so so cool okay so msata SSDs are great for very very small form factor low profile notebooks or netbooks great for using as you know a low density boot drive because this is only 60 gig msata SSDs can only be so big because you've got only room for four flash chips on the whole drive itself so there's two over here as well as the controller so actually here I'm just gonna peel that for a second it has a sand force oh wow this is a sand force controller drive cool SF 2141 and then you've got four flash chips running off of it now it is also useful on the desktop for a certain particular application most people don't want a 60 gig boot drive these days I think slick needs to sneeze so we'll just take a break so it's also useful on the desktop if your motherboard has an msata slot just like this gigabyte one right here does BAM I just installed an SSD which is okay it's neat it's cool you know it's cool but it's mostly useful for Intel smart response technology so if you're on a platform that supports it that is Z68 or whatever platform this is that I don't know what it is because I might release this video before the embargo date as long as it has a mini oops an msata slot then you can I cash your boot hard drive or even another hard drive maybe you have a separate hard drive a storage drive that you have steam installed with all of your games on you can set up your msata drive to cache that drive so whatever games you play most frequently will be cached in your SSD and the ones you don't use as much can stay on the bulk storage of your hard drive so that is a very cool way to use it as well things like shuttle barebones PCs often include them I know there's a 68 one does so you can throw this in on those as well so this is going to become a more popular feature moving forward but if you want to be an early adopter then a data and gigabyte not this board some other board that you've never seen before might be the way to go don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos