Samsung first talked about 32GB solid state drives back in March of last year. With the recently announced 50nm NAND flash memory chips, Samsung is now moving ahead with plans to build these 2.5-inch solid state drives (SSD). Previous drives reached capacities of 8 or 16GB using 4 and 8GB chips. The new chips will be available in 16GB configurations.
Samsung will offer SSDs in both 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch sizes with data read speeds of 57MB/s and data write speeds of 32MB/s.
Among the benefits of solid state drives over current hard drives are reduced power consumption, faster read and write speeds, reduced weight and the elimination of mechanical parts which can fail more often.
Mass production is scheduled to begin this quarter. This bodes well for overall prices as well as upcoming hybrid drives that combine solid state and traditional drives.