Samsung Mass Producing 1.8-inch 64GB Solid State Drives

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced that it has begun mass producing 1.8-inch solid state drives (SSD) at 64GB (gigabytes) [image] - the highest density SSD available today for mobile computing applications.

“We see sharply increasing interest in SSDs among OEMs worldwide amid a growing push to launch premium SSD-based notebooks, particularly in the ultra-mobile category,” said Jim Elliott, director, flash marketing, Samsung Semiconductor, Inc.

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.

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.

Samsung’s mass production of 64GB SSDs makes it the largest producer of high-capacity SSDs in the world.

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.