It's becoming quite clear that SSDs (or solid state drives) most likely represent the future of storage solutions, at least as far as mid-range portable and desktop computing solutions are concerned, as they provide relatively large storage capacities, as well as a higher level of resilience to shocks. And now they offer high data transfer rates as well, since Samsung has just announced the release of 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch 64 GB solid state drives (SSD) with a SATA (Serial ATA) II/native SATA interface.

Samsung's SATA II SSD combines a 50 nm-class, single-level-cell (SLC) 8 GB flash chip with a Samsung proprietary, high-speed SATA controller and supporting software. Furthermore, the new SATA II SSD has a 3.0 gigabit-per-second (Gbps) interface speed which is twice as fast as its SATA I predecessor.

Moreover, the SATA II SSD can attain sequential write speeds of up to 100 Megabyte per second (MBps) and sequential read speed of 120MBps, not to mention the fact that it requires only half as much power as the 1.9 watts consumed by hard drives now used in notebook PCs and only one-tenth the power consumed by enterprise-class 15,000rpm hard drives in servers.

As some of you might know, Samsung is one of the most important innovators in the field of NAND flash modules, as it developed a 32GB PATA SSD in March 2006, followed by a 64GB version using the SATA I interface in March of this year. The market has been moving rapidly toward SATA, which operates faster than its PATA counterpart, with competition intensifying over the development of new SATA-interface devices.

"The 64GB SATA II SSD is based on Samsung's cutting-edge NAND technology with dramatically improved performance specs that are taking system performance to a whole new level of efficiency," said Jim Elliott, director, NAND flash marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

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