Samsung Starts Shipping Ultra-Fast SATA-II Solid-State Drives

Samsung Electronics announced today that it has begun mass producing 64 GB solid state drives (SSDs) with a new Serial-ATA-II Interface (SATA-II). The 64GB solid-state drive model has begun shipping in sampling quantities earlier this month.

The new interface will allow the disk to reach dazzling reading speeds of 100 megabytes per second while reading and 80 MB/s while writing. The company's solid-state drive with SATA-II interface is almost 60 percent faster than the previous model equipped with the SATA I interconnect. It is also alleged to perform up to five times faster than the older hard-disk drives, at a 75 percent lower power consumption (it takes only 1.45 watts, while normal notebook HDDs take up 2.1 watts or more).

The 73-grams solid state drive is reported to represent a premium option for boutique computing systems, such as Dell and Alienware notebooks.

"While there will always be a market for HDDs, we see growing demand for our new SSDs, especially now that they are available with the SATA II interface," said Jim Elliott, director, flash marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. "SSD technology is especially viable for the business and high-end consumer notebook markets because of its outstanding performance, as well as the added value gained from virtually no downtime and faster operating speeds."

The Samsung SATA-II SSDs are extremely reliable and are primarily built using the single-level cell NAND flash technology, that boosts the drive's lifespan up to 100,000 write cycles. Given the fact that solid-state drives have no moving parts, they are more difficult to "kill" than the average hard-disk drives. Samsung's 64 GB SSD can take up shocks of 1500 Gs applied in half a millisecond, while HDDs usually "die" at 300 Gs.

There is no word on pricing yet, but since it is made of single-level cell memory, you'd better visit your bank before ordering it.

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