STEC clearly isn't letting Seagate's accusations of patent infringement get them down, with the company announcing the launch of a new range of 1” solid-state drives for the enterprise market.

The devices, based on the company's MACH4 series of SSDs, packs up to 32GB of storage into a diminutive 1” package supporting both serial and parallel ATA connectivity – although not on the same device, of course. Designed for use in embedded computing devices, the drives use just a single watt of energy – about a twelfth that of a mechanical drive. The teeny-tiny drives also share the same advantages of their bigger brethren with enhanced resistance to shock and extreme temperatures.

Performance is pretty impressive for such a small device, too – the company quotes figures of 90MB/s read and 55MB/s write, although it's worth pointing out that this is for the faster SLC models which max out at 16GB storage, with the 32GB MLC units performing slower.

While you're unlikely to want to replace your desktop drives with these dinky units, they're more than likely to start showing up in future portable devices where the tiny size will be most useful – expect to see these in future MP3/MP4 players and sub-notebooks before long.

As is usual with 'enterprise' product launches, STEC has yet to announce pricing on any of the models in the range.

Impressed by such capacity and performance in a dinky box – and by the modding potential they could offer – or are you still waiting for prices to approach those of traditional mechanical drives before you get excited about SSDs? Share your thoughts over in the forums.