Samsung Begins Mass Production of 64GB SATA 3Gb/s Solid State Drives

Samsung Electronics announced today that it has begun mass producing of 64GB solid state drives (SSDs) utilizing the SATA 3Gb/s data interface. Some of you may be more familiar with the word SATA II, but SATA II and SATA 3Gb/s are two different terms and I prefer to stick with the right one - SATA 3Gb/s. Back on the story, Samsung said its 64GB SATA 3Gb/s SSD, which began shipping in limited quantities earlier this month, will be available as an option within the next few weeks in selected Dell and Alienware notebooks. Able to read data at 100MB per second and write data at 80MB per second, Samsung's new SSD is up to 60% faster than SATA I (1.5Gb/s) drives and performs two to five times faster than conventional hard disk drives (HDDs), according to the company. It also consumes nearly 75% less power than typical HDDs (1.45W compared to 2.1W) and at 73 grams, SSDs are much lighter than HDDs. The SATA II SSD is comprised primarily of single-level-cell NAND flash memory.