Samsung announced that it has begun mass producing 1.8-inch solid state drives (SSD) at 64GB (gigabytes) – the highest density SSD available today for mobile computing applications. The 64GB SSD consists of 64 eight Gigabit (GB) single-level cell flash memory chips. Use of 51nm process technology permits fabrication of much smaller components, with each chip having circuitry 1/2500th the width of a human hair. SSDs feature far greater reliability, faster boot times and faster application start-up times than hard disk drives. SSD can also improve battery life by up to 20 percent in notebooks.
Samsung expects that sales of SSD units will increase at a rapid 270 percent pace industry-wide between now and 2010 to become the largest growth segment in the NAND flash industry. Samsung’s mass production of 64GB SSDs makes it the largest producer of high-capacity SSDs in the world.