[joshua.lyon]

Why are mSATA faster and where are they cheaper?

I figured he was implying that 'regular' SATA drives are platter/disk based drives (as opposed to SSD SATA). And in that line of thinking, mSATA is faster than 'regular' SATA because they are flash memory based. I would argue that mSATA drives are typically more expensive than their SSD SATA counterparts and are most certainly more expensive than their 'regular' SATA counterparts.

Here's a price comparison across the Samsung line of drives in the 500 GB range:

• Regular SATA: $49 (Spinpoint M8)
  
• SSD SATA: $249 (840 EVO SSD)
  
• mSATA: $279 (840 EVO mSATA)