Samsung today claimed to be the first company to produce a solid-state drive using a Serial ATA II bus, giving it the added headroom to take advantage of higher flash memory speeds. The interface gives the 1.8-inch, 64GB disk as much as three gigabits per second of bandwidth and uses improved NAND flash memory to write data as quickly as 100MB per second -- more than twice as fast as the 45 megabytes of earlier solid-state drives and even faster than a conventional 1.8-inch hard disk, Samsung says. Read speeds are faster still at 120MB per second.

This speed lets the disk serve not only as a high-speed alternative to the drives found in many ultraportable notebooks but also makes it an effective alternative to power-consuming, high-RPM hard drives: the new SSD consumes half the power of a notebook drive at an average 1.9W and even less compared to the 15,000RPM disks often found in servers, according to Samsung. The lack of moving parts also extends the average lifespan of the drive from less than 300,000 hours to 2 million.

The Korean firm is currently sampling the new 64GB drive and has not said when it expects mass production, though this typically follows a few months later. Customers for the drive have not been listed but should include manufacturers of both notebooks and high-performance desktops.