Samsung ships 64GB solid-state notebook drive

Samsung today began shipping a new 2.5-inch, 64GB solid-state drive, becoming one of the first to ship a high capacity flash drive for notebooks in the US. The capacity doubles the 32GB of previous drives and gives owners the option of installing much more software while taking advantage of the greatly improved loading times and battery life of solid-state drives. It also produces very little noise and should be shockproof, Samsung says. The Serial ATA connection helps to both maximize the bandwidth available to the drive and let the drive drop into almost any modern notebook to replace traditional rotating hard disks.

The drive makes its first appearance today as an option for Alienware and Dell notebooks: the former's Area-51 m9750 can use two of the drives in a RAID stripe to form a continuous 128GB solid-state drive with extremely fast drive access; users can also pick one 64GB drive and back it up with a 200GB, 7200RPM traditional drive to speed up the OS while still providing the room for a large number of games. Dell's 13.3-inch XPS M1330 can also replace the lone drive with Samsung's 64GB model to speed up and reduce the weight of the already light 4-pound system.

Pricing for the 64GB drive adds $1,100 to the base cost of the Alienware system. Dell hasn't revealed its M1330 upgrade costs but will likely follow closely with its own option. Other computer manufacturers are expected to use the storage in ultraportable systems; Apple is rumored to be developing a subnotebook that uses solid-state technology for some or all of its storage.